How we work

No tender, no day-rate,
no surprises.

A typical HCOMS engagement runs through five phases over a few months. The first one is paid, the last one never really ends. The shape and the pricing are deliberately predictable. Here’s the whole thing on one page.

Five phases

The anatomy of an engagement.

Every phase has a clear scope, a fixed price and a written deliverable. You can stop at any phase boundary without penalty. Most clients don’t.

Diagnostic
2 weeks · fixed fee
We spend time with the people who’ll actually use the thing, not just the people who’ll pay for it. We map the workflow, the data, the tools you already use and the constraints nobody’s written down. The output is a written report covering what we’d build, what we’d leave alone, what we’d integrate with, and what it’ll cost.

What you bring

  • Time from two or three of the people who do the work
  • Read access to whatever spreadsheets, docs and systems exist
  • One stakeholder empowered to answer questions

What you get

  • A written, signed-off scope
  • A fixed price for phase ③
  • A go / no-go decision — you can stop here
Spec & design
1–2 weeks · fixed fee
We translate the diagnostic into a buildable spec: data model, screens, integrations, permissions, deployment plan. You see wireframes; you see the database schema in plain English; you see exactly what month-one through month-three of the build looks like.

The principle

You sign off the spec before we write production code. Nothing gets figured out on the fly, and nothing is allowed to surface as an unexpected cost at week six.

Build
6–8 weeks typical · fixed monthly
A senior engineer takes the spec and builds it. Weekly demos, with real users on real data inside the first three weeks rather than at the end. The default stack is the one we run our own products on (Laravel, Livewire, Tailwind and PostgreSQL on Azure or AWS), unless there’s a specific reason to vary.

What “done” means

  • The whole spec, deployed, on UK infrastructure
  • Tested with your data, by your team
  • Documented — runbook, schema, integration points
  • Handover session with whoever’ll administer it
Release
1–2 weeks · fixed fee
We migrate the data and run the new system in parallel with whatever it’s replacing for one full cycle of your work, whether that’s a quarter, a month or a single campaign. The old system is then retired properly, with a handover note. The parallel run is the part that quietly determines whether the project sticks or reverts; we don’t skip it.
Run
Indefinite · flat monthly
We host the system, monitor it, patch it and evolve it. There’s no separate support team to hand off to; the engineer who wrote a bug is the one who fixes it at 3pm on a Tuesday. Most of our clients have been with us for five years or more, and we expect that pattern to continue.

What’s included

  • UK Azure or AWS hosting, monitored 24/7
  • Security patches, dependency updates, framework upgrades
  • UK office-hours support, named contacts
  • Quarterly roadmap conversation
  • Up to a defined budget of evolution work each month

What costs extra

  • Major new features (treated as a small "build" engagement of their own)
  • Out-of-hours incident response if you want it
How the money works

Honest, flat,
predictable.

You always know what next month costs. Pricing is per outcome or per month, fixed up front, and never tied to feature counts or user seats.

The diagnostic is the one paid up-front commitment. From there, every phase has a written price agreed before we start, on a rolling 90-day basis. If we’re not earning our keep you can leave with a quarter’s notice. Most don’t.

Diagnostic
Fixed

Two-week paid look-and-listen. Output is a signed-off scope and a price.

Build & release
Per outcome

Fixed price agreed up front. Weekly demos. We absorb our overruns.

Run
Flat / month

Hosting, support, security and a defined budget of evolution work. Rolling 90-day terms.

Surprises
£0

No per-feature upsell, no mystery overage, no “turns out you need a module we forgot to mention”.

What you can rely on

Three commitments
baked into the model.

The team that builds, runs.

The engineer who wrote a bug is the one who fixes it. Accountability is part of the structure rather than something bolted on afterwards.

UK throughout.

UK-based engineers, UK-hosted infrastructure (Azure or AWS, your pick) and UK office-hours support. Nothing is subcontracted out and nothing is offshored.

Long horizons.

Most of our clients have been with us for five years or more. That changes how we write code: the next person to read a function is usually a future version of us.

Next step

Got something the off-the-shelf market hasn’t solved?

Drop us a line. The first conversation is free; if it makes sense to take it further, the next step is the paid two-week diagnostic.