Why we don’t want to be your agency.

If you run a business and you have ever paid for a website, a booking system, an app or a system to run the whole place on, there is a good chance you paid an agency. That is normal. It is also, most of the time, the biggest reason the work cost what it did.

Here is how it usually goes. The agency finds you. It sends someone to talk to you, understand what you need and give you a quote. You say yes. Then the agency hands the actual work to a developer, often a freelancer, sometimes in another country, and keeps the difference between what you paid and what the developer is paid.

You pay more than the work is worth. The person doing the work is paid less than they should be. And everything you say has to be passed along before it reaches the person who can do something about it.

We were the developer.

Each of us has been on the other end of that arrangement. We built websites and systems for clients inside agencies, and we saw what those clients were charged for our work. The gap was not small.

Nobody was doing anything wrong. The agency found the client, took on the risk and managed the project. That is a real service. But it is an expensive one, and for most jobs it is not the part the client wanted. What they wanted was the thing that got built.

What we do instead.

We are a small team of engineers who have built and run real products together. Write to either of us and you get both of us: the people who will build your software, from the first reply to the day it goes live to every change after that. There is no account manager, no handover, and no extra charge for passing messages along.

We start with your business, not with a feature list. Before anything is built, we write down what actually happens in your week and what it costs you. Then we build the part that matters most first, so you are using it while we build the next.

Workpiece is not a company standing between you and us. It does not take a cut of your job, hold your money or send your invoice. Each of us trades as a registered business, and every job comes with a written agreement and a proper invoice.

Work that lasts.

Some jobs end the day they go live. Most of the ones that matter don’t. The system your business runs on needs someone to keep it running, fix what breaks and change it as the business changes.

An agency will sell you that too, as a monthly contract. The cut is still in it, every month. And agencies move their developers between clients, so a year in, the person who knew your system has usually moved on and someone new is learning it at your expense.

With us, the engineers who built it are the ones who stay. Part of it is partnership: we keep learning how your business runs and tell you what is worth building next. Part of it is upkeep: we keep it running, fix what breaks and make the changes you ask for, for a fixed monthly fee you can stop any time. Both of us know your system, so it never hangs on one person.

What that means for you.

1. 1
   You pay for the work, not the middle.The price you are quoted is the engineers’ price.
2. 2
   You talk to the people doing the work.They understand your business, because they looked at how it runs before they built anything.
3. 3
   You own everything.Your domain, your code, your customer data, in accounts under your name. Leave any time and take all of it with you.
4. 4
   We stay if you want us to.As a partner who knows your business, and as the people who keep it running, for a fixed monthly fee you can stop any time.

The honest limit.

We cannot promise how a job turns out. What we can promise is that you never pay before you have seen something real: a plain-English review of what we would fix, or a working demo of the part that matters most.