The first call is free. If your question can be answered in that call, we will answer it there and you will owe us nothing.
Every vendor has one. So does the loudest engineer, the article someone read last week, and now the model you asked at midnight. What is missing is not another opinion. It is one you can interrogate, from someone who has to stand behind it.
Three proposals, three very different numbers, and no way to tell which one has quietly left out the hard half of the work.
No baselineConfidence reads as competence in a meeting. The quietest person in the room is often the one who has done this before.
Loudest winsNo single decision was wrong. Fifty small ones accumulated, and now everything is entangled with everything else.
DriftThe recommendation may be excellent. You have no way of knowing, because you cannot check the reasoning behind it.
UnverifiableAnyone can give you an answer.
Ask for the reasoning, and see how many can.
That is the actual product here. Not a verdict, but a recommendation with its working shown, written so your team can argue with it and so you can take it to somebody else for a third opinion.
Yes, structurally, and pretending otherwise would be the first sign not to trust us. A studio that also builds has an interest in your answer being "build it". So it is worth saying exactly how we handle that, rather than leaving you to hope.
The two things we recommend most often are: build less than you planned, and keep more of what you already have.
Neither is the profitable answer. Both are usually the correct one. Advisory work is scoped and paid for as advisory work, the recommendation is written down with its reasoning, and you are free to take it to any other company and have them pick it apart. If the right answer is that you do not need us, that is what the document will say.
It is also why we would rather be judged on what happens in month six than on how impressive the proposal looked in week one. If the plan we recommended fails, we are the ones who have to explain why. That concentrates the mind in a way an anonymous answer never does.
Four kinds of work, all ending in a written document you can circulate rather than a conversation you have to remember.
An honest read on the system you already have.
AssessmentBefore you sign, hire or commit the budget.
EvaluationTurning intent into a sequence somebody can execute.
DirectionBecause most technical problems are eventually organisational.
CapabilityUsually at a moment where the next decision is expensive and the information available is not good enough to make it with.
Short, and pointed at a decision. Consulting that runs for months without producing one is a cost centre wearing a suit.
What decision is in front of you, when it has to be made, and what happens if it is wrong. Sometimes it is answerable in that call, and then we answer it and stop.
What we will look at, what we will produce, how long it takes and what it costs, agreed in writing before any work begins.
Code, architecture, infrastructure, contracts, quotes, and conversations with your team, who almost always know where the problems are.
Options laid out with their real trade-offs, including the option of doing nothing, which is more often correct than consultants tend to admit.
Recommendation, reasoning, rejected alternatives, risks and a first step. Written for both the people who sign and the people who build.
A session with your team and stakeholders to challenge it properly. A recommendation nobody argued with is a recommendation nobody examined.
We advise on what we have built, and we say so when a question falls outside that. For longer-running business and transformation advisory, see our consultancy engagements.
The difference between advice and experience is having been there in month six, when the plan met real users and something had to give. Everyone giving you an opinion should have that, and most do not.
Hands-on experience per engineer, across agencies, product companies and enterprises. Advice from people who still write code.
Small by design. The person on your call is the person doing the review, not an account manager relaying it.
Web and mobile products, connected devices, AI-assisted systems and cloud engineering, kept running long after launch. See how we work.
Take it to your board, your team, or another company for a third opinion. It is written with the reasoning shown precisely so it can survive that.
We will sign a mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement any time you want one, at no cost. You can read the exact document we use before you ask for it.
It is a fair question and the honest answer is that the incentive exists, so we handle it explicitly. Advisory work is scoped and paid for as advisory work, and the recommendation is written down with the reasoning shown so you can take it to anyone else and have them check it. In practice our most common recommendations are to build less than planned and to keep more of what you already have, neither of which is the profitable answer.
Yes, and it is one of the most common reasons people call us. We go through what is included, what is conspicuously not, whether the estimate is plausible for the described scope, which assumptions will turn into change requests later, and what the contract says about ownership and handover. Often the useful outcome is a list of questions to put back to the vendor rather than a verdict.
Most reviews are days rather than months. A focused architecture review or a quote evaluation is usually a few days including the written report. Ongoing advisory, where we act as a technical sounding board through a project, works better as a regular arrangement. We scope and price it before starting either way.
A written document, not a verbal summary that evaporates. It states the recommendation, the reasoning behind it, the options that were rejected and why, the risks, and what to do first. It is written to be readable by non-technical decision makers and checkable by technical ones, because usually both have to be convinced.
If they are, yes, and we will do it in a way that is about the decision rather than the people. Frequently the opposite happens: your engineers have been saying the right thing for months and it needed an outside voice to be heard. We are not there to undermine an internal team, and an engagement that turns into that helps nobody.
Yes. Some clients keep us on a light retainer as a technical sounding board: someone to check a hiring decision, review an architecture change or sanity-check a supplier before committing. For broader business and transformation advisory, our consultancy page covers how those longer engagements are structured.