Pricing
Hours, tools, company cost. Agreed before work starts.
Most quotes in this industry are a number with no derivation behind it. Ours is arithmetic: the hours the work takes, what it runs on, and the share of company cost that keeps a team available to do it. Here is the whole model.
- Quote basis
- Hours, tools, company cost
- Agreed
- Before work starts
- Published anchors
- 17
- Shapes
- 3
the same three lines on every quote
a fixed price does not move once agreed
of 19 entry points carry a price band
fixed price, monthly care plan, hourly or weekly capacity
Anatomy of a quote
Three lines. That is the whole model.
Every price we give is built from the same three components. Open each one to see what sits inside it and what makes it move.
The hours the work takes, estimated before it starts. On a fixed price the estimate is the number we quote; on hourly work the hours are reported as they are used.
What is in it
- Scoping and technical design
- Building, testing, and code review
- Handover, documentation, and the fixes that follow first contact with reality
What moves it
- How much of the problem is rules versus judgment
- How clean the systems it has to touch already are
- Whether it has to keep running afterwards, or just work once
What the system runs on and what it costs to keep it running, quoted separately so you can see it.
What is in it
- Hosting, databases, queues, and monitoring
- Third-party APIs, proxies, and data sources
- Licences the build genuinely needs
What moves it
- Volume: a pipeline at scale costs more to run than a weekly report
- Whether infrastructure sits in your accounts or ours
- How much redundancy the work actually warrants
The indirect cost of being a company you can hire: finding you, staying available, and staying solvent between projects.
What is in it
- Cost of finding the work: this site, outreach, and the time spent on enquiries that never become projects
- Bench time between projects, so capacity exists when you need it
- Insurance, accounting, legal, and the entities in each market
What moves it
- Repeat clients carry less of it than first engagements
- Referred work carries less than work we had to go find
- Longer engagements amortise it further
The quote you get names its own numbers.
Why the number is lower
An engagement here costs less than staffing the same work locally, and the quality bar does not move to get there.
Qelv is a US company with a distributed team. We hire from a global pool rather than from one city's salary market, and the engineers on your work are senior: the same people who scoped it. There is no layer of account managers between the person you brief and the person who builds.
Two things make the number lower, and both are structural. Hiring globally means the same seniority costs less than it does in one city's salary market. And the company cost above is genuinely smaller: no office, no sales floor, no delivery-manager tier, no margin stacked to satisfy an investor.
Neither of those is a discount on the work itself. What does not move is the standard: work is reviewed, tested, and documented, it lands in your repository, and it runs in your accounts. If an engineer would not pass your own hiring bar, they are not on your project.
What we will not do to get there
We do not discount by cutting review or testing
The cheapest way to lower a quote is to skip the work that catches problems later. We price that work in and say so.
We do not staff junior and bill senior
You are told who is doing the work. Where a task genuinely suits a less senior engineer, it is priced that way.
We do not quote low and change-order up
A fixed price is agreed before work starts and does not move. If scope changes, that is a new conversation with its own number, not a surprise on an invoice.
The shapes
Fixed, hourly, or monthly. One arithmetic.
Fixed price
We estimate the hours, add what it runs on, add the company-cost share, and quote one number. If it takes us longer than estimated, that is our problem, not a change order.
Best for: A defined build: an automation, an operational platform, a prototype, a data pipeline.
Monthly care plan
A monthly figure covering monitoring, fixes, and a set amount of change. Capped, cancellable, and only offered where a running system genuinely needs an owner.
Best for: A system where continuity matters: a pipeline that must keep delivering, an automation the business now depends on.
Hourly or weekly capacity
You buy engineering time and point it at what you need. Rates are agreed before the first week and time is reported against them.
Best for: Overflow delivery and staff augmentation, where scope is yours to direct week to week.
The anchors
What the common jobs cost.
Bands, not quotes: the arithmetic above decides where inside a band a given piece of work lands. Where no band is shown, we quote from the scope. Every one of these has a free first step in front of it, and none of them requires the next.
| Engagement | What it is | Practice | Typical |
|---|---|---|---|
| Operational Platform Build | The workflow a department runs on, built as real software with the roles, records and history it needs. | Build | $2K–$6KFixed price · 2 to 4 weeks |
| Two-Week Prototype | A working version in two weeks, not a specification document. Real data, clickable, and the repository is yours. | Build | $2.5K–$5KFixed price · 2 weeks |
| Site Build and Rescue | A production site with structured content, or the rescue of one that nobody can update without a developer. We run our own store, so this is not theory. | Build | $1.5K–$5KFixed price · 1 to 5 weeks |
| Hire-Deflection Automation Sprint | Automate the repeatable part of an open ops, admin, marketing, or support role before filling the whole seat. | Automate | $1.5K–$3.5KFixed price · optional care plan afterwards · 2 to 3 weeks |
| The Monday Report | The weekly report builds itself, out of the systems the numbers already live in, and lands before anyone asks for it. | Automate | $1K–$2.5KFixed price · 1 to 2 weeks |
| System-to-System Sync | Data entered once. Your CRM and accounting stop needing a person to copy between them, and it keeps running after we are gone. | Automate | $1.5K–$3KFixed price · 1 to 2 weeks |
| Intake and Inbox Agent | Every inbound form, email and quote request answered and routed the same hour, with anything it cannot judge escalated to a person visibly. | Automate | $1.5K–$3KFixed price · 2 to 3 weeks |
| Scraper and Data-Feed Rescue | Take over the pipeline that keeps breaking and keep clean data moving: blocks, captchas, layout changes, retries, alerts. | Data | $1.5K–$3KFixed price · optional monthly run · 1 to 3 weeks |
| Competitor and Market Monitor | Know what competitors changed before your team notices: prices, availability, catalog, or copy, collected on a schedule. | Data | $1.5K–$3KSetup · optional monthly run · 1 to 3 weeks |
| Reporting Layer | One dashboard your team actually opens, built off the data you already have rather than off a new system. | Data | $2K–$5KFixed price · 2 to 4 weeks |
| Data Cleanup and Enrichment | The list, catalog or contact file deduped, corrected and filled in. Once, properly, with the rules written down. | Data | $1K–$3KOne-off · 1 to 2 weeks |
| Outbound Engine Build | We build the outbound system and you own it: lists, mailboxes and domains, sequences, tracking. No platform of ours in the middle. | Growth | $2K–$4KFixed price · optional monthly run · 2 to 3 weeks |
| Deliverability Diagnostic | After the free bounce read: authentication and infrastructure checked, the list cleansed, a suppression file built, and a fix list in priority order. | Growth | $300–$700Fixed price · About one week |
| Lifecycle Email Build | The follow-up emails that should already be sending, sending. Written, built, and handed over in your account. | Growth | $1.5K–$3KFixed price · 2 weeks |
| Overflow Dev Bench | Senior hands on your overflow, white-label, weekly invoicing, cancel anytime. Your client never sees us. | Talent | $25–$40Per hour · weekly invoicing |
| Dedicated Engineer | A named engineer on your team, your standups, your tools, month to month. More only when the work earns it, and no placement fee. | Talent | $2.4K–$4.8KPer month, part time to full time |
| Fractional Ops or Data Engineer | The engineer you cannot justify full time, a few days a month, on the systems that keep needing one. | Talent | $1.5K–$3KPer month |
| Website and Growth System | Build the site, tracking, local search, catalog, or follow-up system around demand you can measure. | Growth | Scoped case by caseAgreed before work starts |
| Try-a-Dev Week | One week, one task, see the work before you decide anything. The cheapest way to find out whether this works for you. | Talent | Scoped case by caseOne fixed week block · 1 week |
Every quote
Every quote says all of this.
Sometimes the honest answer is that the work is not worth doing. We say so before quoting it, even though that costs us the quote.
- The scope, and explicitly what is out of it
- The KPI the work will be judged on
- The number, and the delivery window
- What runs on your accounts versus ours
- What happens if scope changes mid-build
Want to see what the repeat work costs you today? The Automate page has an estimator. Move the sliders to your own numbers and it shows the cost. Run your own numbers
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