How it works
Five steps, and you can stop after any of them. Nothing is built before you have seen what it costs and agreed to it in writing.
30 minutes · phone or Teams · no charge
I want to hear what you are trying to achieve, where the pain actually is, and what you have already tried. By the end of it you will know whether I can help you, what a solution might look like, and roughly how big the work is. If I am not the right person for it, I will say so on the call.
From $1,500 · fixed fee · credited against a build
I work through your actual workflow - how time and equipment get from the field to the office, and every place a number is written down twice. You get a written findings document: where the work is being redone, what each break costs, and a prioritised list of fixes with the effort each one takes. The fee is agreed before anything starts, and if you go ahead with a build within 90 days the whole of it comes off the price. The document is yours either way.
Scope, price and timeline in writing
Before anything is built you get the scope, the price and the timeline in writing. No hourly meter, so there is nothing to watch and nothing to argue about at the end. If the scope changes once we are underway, that is a written change order agreed at the time - never a surprise on the final invoice.
Scheduled updates · periodic reviews · your people testing it
You see it as it is built. Progress updates on a schedule, reviews at the points where a decision matters, and your own people testing it against real work rather than a demo. Adjustments happen while they are cheap, and the thing that goes live is the thing your crews have already used.
Training · maintenance · small changes · from $150 a month
Training for the people who will actually use it, in the words they use for the work. After that, ongoing support covers infrastructure maintenance, small changes as the business shifts, and a monthly follow-up - scaled to the size of your operation rather than sold as one package.
The decision that shapes the rest
This one is yours to make, and it decides where the application lives, what the documentation has to cover, and what handover looks like. It is worth settling early, because it changes the quote.
The application is yours outright. It runs on your infrastructure, or in a cloud account in your name, and the documentation is written for a developer who has never met me. Costs more up front, and leaves nobody standing between you and the system your crews run on.
You pay less at the start and I carry the hosting and the maintenance. Sensible where you would rather not take on another system to look after, and where the monthly is easier to carry than the capital.
If I am not around
It is a fair question to ask of one person, and the answer goes in the agreement rather than being left to trust: we can write in access to the source on GitHub should I become unavailable. Either way you are never one person away from losing a system your crews depend on.
Thirty minutes on the phone costs you nothing and tells us both whether there is something here. Or take the audit first and bring the score to the call.