Frequently asked questions, answered straight. before you sign anything.

Day one, every time, because you can’t add real multi-tenancy in week ten without a rebuild. Tenant isolation lives at the schema, row-level security is wired before the first feature, and the audit log is tenant-scoped from the first commit. We’ve done the year-two retrofit for clients who skipped it. We’d rather you never paid for that.

One short document per spine decision, committed to your repo at /docs/architecture/ on the day the call is made. Each one names the question, the constraint, the options we weighed, and the option we chose, with both alternatives preserved so the next engineer inherits the why and not just the what. By the time you go to production there’s a folder of them. That folder is what carries a Series B diligence call.

That’s the whole point of the ADR folder, the audit log, and the test suite. Our code has gone through acquirer reviews without flinching. The diligence call lasts about half an hour instead of two days, because every spine decision is already written down and dated. We build for the reader who joins your team in year three, not just for the demo on Friday.

We default to MERN on AWS, which is the largest hiring pool in the UK, so a stack swap is rarely the investor’s real concern. When it is, the clean service boundaries and the ADR trail mean a migration is a scoped piece of work, not a teardown. We’ll write the migration plan with you and price it openly. Nothing about the architecture locks you to us.

You can walk away cleanly, with 30 days’ notice, in either direction. The retainer is month to month. IP assigns on commit, so your code lives in your GitHub org from the first day. There’s no lock-in, no exit fee, and no “you need us to keep the lights on”. The retainer earns its place every month or it ends.

Week one is on paper. We read what exists, draw the system as it should be, write the trade-offs down, and make the spine calls with you in the room. You walk away with a diagram, an ADR pack, and a fixed scope, whether or not you go on to build with us. It’s £8K, fixed, and it’s the cheapest way to find out if the rest of the work is worth doing.

A short Loom most days, a written standup note, and a 30-minute demo at the end of each sprint. Code lands in your repo with the diagram updated and the migration notes attached, so you can read progress without a call. We keep meetings to the architecture decisions that genuinely need your voice. Everything else is async and in writing.

Yes, with 14 days’ notice. Engineers move to other work, the spend pauses, and you resume with 14 days’ notice the other way. There’s no cancellation fee for pausing. We’d rather hold your slot than burn your runway while you close the round.

Every project pairs two seniors, not one, and every decision goes into an ADR the same day it’s made. Mohit reviews every PR that touches the spine, so the context never lives in one head. We’ve had two handovers in seven years, both completed inside 48 hours, because the why was already written down.

You keep everything: the code in your org, the ADR folder, the runbook, the migration notes, and the test suite. IP assigns on commit, so none of it was ever really ours to hand over. We’ll walk your in-house team through the spine, then stay available on retainer if you want us, or step away cleanly if you don’t.

We design UK and EU GDPR-aware from the schema up. There’s a signed DPA, Standard Contractual Clauses for any cross-border transfer, and a sub-processor list that’s versioned so you always know who touches the data. Residency is a deployment-region decision we make with you in the audit week, not a surprise after launch.

There’s a DSAR runbook with a defendable 30-day response window, and right-to-erasure is built at the schema, not bolted on after a complaint. When the request lands, you run the runbook instead of paging an engineer. The audit log shows exactly what was accessed and erased, which is the part the ICO actually wants to see.

Yes, and the pen-test report is yours, held and ready for diligence. We threat-model the top abuse patterns during the audit week and fix the findings before launch, not after a breach. In seven years of production code we’ve had zero customer-data breaches, and we keep the receipts that prove it.

We do. We build FCA-aware audit trails for fintech, with the boundaries placed where the next FCA visit expects them, and we’ve shipped against NHS DSPT expectations for health clients. Regulated work needs the compliance boundary decided on paper in week one, which is exactly what the architecture audit is for.

Mohit Ramani, lead architect and founder, reviews every PR that touches the spine. Priya Mehta runs principal backend on payments and identity. Arjun Patel is the senior AI engineer for RAG, agents, and evals. Aanya Iyer leads senior frontend across Next.js, React Native, and Flutter. We name your two paired seniors in the audit week, so you know exactly who’s writing the code before you sign.

Yes. One of our seniors sits next to one of yours on every PR, and your developer keeps shipping while picking up the architectural reasoning in real time. It’s the model in-house teams ask for most, because it raises the bar on your side without us owning everything. By the end your engineer is stronger, not dependent.

Yes. We’ll sign a 12-month no-poach with referring agencies on request, both for your staff and your clients. We work white-label behind agencies often, and the whole arrangement falls apart if you can’t trust us in front of your account. Protecting your relationship is the deal, not a favour.

Twelve seniors across backend, mobile, AI, and infrastructure, with 96% engineer retention, so the bench is real people who’ve shipped together for years, not contractors we find when you ask. When a build needs more hands, we add a senior who already knows our review discipline. We’ll tell you honestly if the work needs a skill we don’t hold, and point you to someone who does.

We’ll sign your NDA before you send a single line of the brief. Mohit reads every first email personally and replies inside 24 hours with a clear yes, a clear no, or the one question that decides it. Once you’re a yes, the audit week can usually start within a fortnight, sooner if your timeline is tight.