The same four phases on every engagement: a 5-day audit, a fixed-price sprint, a handover sprint, then optional on-call. Weekly Loom, a one-page note, a staging URL — no silent scope creep.
The same four phases on every engagement since 2019. You see the shape before you sign, and the thing we ship is the thing your team inherits and your acquirer's CTO reads without flinching.
The agency took the brief, took the money, and went quiet for three weeks. No Loom, no staging URL, no written scope. When the demo finally came, half of it didn't work and nobody could say why. Four months gone, no plan she could read.
She came to us asking one question: what happens, week by week, and how will I know if it's going wrong? We answered with the same four phases we run every time. Audit week 1, the brief and the quote on Friday, fixed-price sprint from week 2, a Loom and a one-page note every single Friday.
Twelve weeks later her team took the wheel with a runbook, an ADR pack, and an on-call walkthrough recorded. The process is the product. This page is for founders who want to see the plan before they wire the deposit.
Four phases on every engagement. Audit, sprint, handover, retainer. You decide whether to continue at the end of each. None of it is improvised, because we've run this exact shape since 2019.
“I need to know what's actually broken before I commit to a build.”
5-day fixed-scope audit, £8K. Day 1 kickoff and access. Day 2-3 code, infra and integration audit. Day 4 founder and tech-lead interviews. Day 5 a 30-page brief, six ADRs and a fixed sprint quote in your inbox. You decide whether to continue.
“I've been quoted a range so wide it's useless. What am I actually paying for?”
Fixed-price sprint, milestone billing. Week 1: repo, CI, observability, secrets and the first user story to staging. Weeks 2-12: shipping. Every Friday a Loom and a one-page note. Milestones at week 4, 8 and 13. You sign off in writing at each.
“The last team left and nobody on my side could explain a single decision.”
A handover sprint, not a zip file. Runbook written. ADRs in the repo. On-call walkthrough recorded. A code review of every file with your team. Observability dashboards walked through. Your team takes the wheel.
“I don't have a CTO yet. Who keeps this honest after launch?”
Optional retainer, £5K+/month. One day a week of senior engineering. Performance work, a new surface, observability tuning, incident response. 28-month median tenure. Or your team takes it from here. No lock-in either way.
You shouldn't have to ask how it's going. Every milestone in the sprint ships these six things, in plain English, on the same rhythm we've run since 2019.
A 5-minute weekly video in plain English. What we shipped, what's next, what's blocking us. No jargon, no slides.
A short Markdown summary attached to the Loom. Bullet points you can forward to a co-founder or an investor in seconds.
Every milestone ships to a staging URL you can show your team and your investors. Clickable, instrumented, real.
Anything that needs you, framed as two options, our recommendation, and a deadline. No silent assumptions.
Pinned per milestone, with every decision and artefact linked. Searchable forever, so context never walks out the door.
A one-page summary at milestone end. You sign off in writing, we proceed to the next phase. Nothing built off a verbal yes.
A process is only worth the discipline behind it. These are the four rules that hold the audit-sprint-handover shape together on every engagement, and why founders sign a second contract.
No build starts without the 5-day audit. You get the brief, the ADRs and the fixed quote first, so you commit to a plan you've read, not a hope.
Your CFO sees one number, billed against milestones at week 4, 8 and 13. You never pay more than one milestone ahead of working software.
Every Friday a Loom, a one-page note and a staging URL. You're never waiting three weeks to find out the build went sideways.
A handover sprint with a runbook, ADRs in the repo and an on-call walkthrough recorded. Your team inherits the why, not just the what.
What the audit-sprint-handover process looks like in numbers a Series B diligence team can check. Codenamed clients, real figures.
We don't publish a price on a page, because every estate is different. Pick the shape that fits where you are, and Mohit sends your real number inside 24 hours.
One week, fixed cost. We audit the code, the infra and the integrations, interview your team, and hand you a plan you can read.
Eight to fourteen weeks of fixed-scope, fixed-price shipping. Weekly Loom, milestone billing, a handover sprint at the end.
After handover. One day a week of senior engineering and architectural advisory while your team takes the wheel.
“The last agency went quiet for three weeks and shipped nothing I could use. Empyreal sent a Loom and a staging URL every Friday. Twelve weeks later my team took it over with a runbook and an ADR pack. I knew exactly where the money went.”
— Nadia R., founder, UK B2B SaaSPain-first, soft-second.
You see the whole shape before you sign. Our software development process is the same four phases on every engagement: a 5-day audit at £8K, a fixed-price sprint of 8-14 weeks, a handover sprint, then an optional retainer. The audit ends with a 30-page brief, six ADRs and a fixed quote in your inbox, so the deposit buys a plan you've read, not a hope. If you don't want to continue after the audit, you keep the brief and walk away.
Every Friday you get a Loom, a one-page note and a staging URL. You're never waiting three weeks to find out the build went sideways. Anything that needs a decision from you comes as two options, our recommendation and a deadline, so there are no silent assumptions. If the work hits a wall, we tell you in writing the same week, then offer two paths: absorb the slip at our cost, or revise the scope with you before we resume.
The audit is fixed at £8K. After that, the agile software development process is line-itemed in the sprint quote, milestone by milestone, billed at week 4, 8 and 13. You see the cost of each piece and can cut any piece. You never pay more than one milestone ahead of working software, and a 30-day walk-away clause goes both ways. If we can't hit your budget, we tell you in the audit week, not three months in.
Every decision lands in an ADR the same day it's made, and every commit goes through review, so context never lives in one person's head. The same seniors who sign your scope are the ones who ship it, which is why our engineer retention sits at 96%. In seven years, when an engineer has moved on mid-build, the next senior had full context by the next morning. No client has noticed a gap in their sprint.
Handover is a phase, not a zip file. In weeks 13-14 we write the runbook, leave the ADRs in the repo, record an on-call walkthrough, and code-review every file with your team. We walk through the observability dashboards so you know what healthy looks like and what to do when it isn't. Your team inherits the why behind every decision, not just the what. We stay on call for 30 days after launch at no extra cost.
That's what the ADR pack and the runbook are for. Every architectural call is written down with the options we considered, so a diligence team reads the reasoning, not a black box. We achieved SOC 2 Type II internally in December 2025 and wire a Vanta evidence pipeline from day one on client engagements. Code we've shipped runs 320M+ API calls a year with zero customer-data breaches in seven years. The numbers are real and you can check them.
The audit week flags data-residency and GDPR decisions up front, and they go into the ADRs before any code is written. We ship a signed DPA with SCCs for cross-border transfer, a versioned sub-processor list, a 30-day DSAR runbook and right-to-erasure handled at the schema. UK and EU data can sit in the region your customers expect. For procurement, we hand over a pre-filled SIG-Lite and CAIQ, a pen-test summary and a DR plan.
You walk away cleanly. The retainer is optional, £5K+/month for one day a week of senior engineering, and you can pause or cancel any month with 30 days' notice. IP assigns to you on every commit, so you keep everything regardless. Our median retainer tenure is 28 months, but that's because clients choose to stay, not because the contract traps them. Your team can take the whole thing in-house off the handover pack whenever you're ready.
A look at the kind of software development process surface we hand over — real screens, real data, documented and yours from day one.
Tell us your current estate, your deadline, and the outcome you're after. Mohit replies inside 24 hours with availability and the next 5-day audit slot: a clear yes, a clear no, or the one question that decides it.
Yes, no, or the deciding question, plus the next audit slot.
A 30-page brief, six ADRs and a fixed sprint quote in your inbox.
Repo, CI, observability live, the first user story on staging.