Taking two projects this quarter
AI features, automation, data pipelines, web apps and product builds — designed, built, and shipped on one flat monthly fee. You own the code from the first commit.
+ all the boring stuff (emails, monitoring,
error tracking, SEO tags)
you book one call
Our code runs on these
The platforms we build on, deploy to, and get paged by. Everything we ship runs on your accounts under your billing — no proprietary runtime in the middle.
Services
Nine things we do properly. Most projects are a mix of two or three of them.
You've had the idea for six months and a slide deck instead of a product.
Version one of a product you can launch, charge for, and keep building on. Small on purpose, complete where it counts.
e.g. SaaS v1 with auth, billing, and an admin panel
"Add AI to it" isn't a scope — and a chatbot that makes things up is worse than no chatbot.
Assistants grounded in your own data, extraction and classification pipelines, agents that do real work — built so they fail predictably.
e.g. RAG chat over a live site, structured extraction from messy documents
Your team runs the business out of spreadsheets and Slack DMs because no one's built the internal tool yet.
Dashboards, portals, internal tools, and the unglamorous plumbing underneath them. Next.js and TypeScript, deployed on your accounts.
e.g. Customer portals, admin dashboards, API and SDK work
Your API works until someone outside your team tries to use it without asking you a question first.
Public and internal APIs designed to be integrated against — versioned, authenticated, documented, and hard to break by accident.
e.g. Public REST API with keys and quotas, partner integrations, a typed SDK
Deploys are a ritual only one person can perform, and nobody finds out it broke until a customer says so.
Cloud setup, deploy pipelines, monitoring and alerting — configured on your accounts so nothing depends on us being around.
e.g. CI/CD with preview environments, error tracking, uptime alerts, staged rollouts
The design looked great in Figma and fell apart the moment real data went into it.
Interface and product design taken through to working code — layouts, states, and a component system that stays consistent as you add pages.
e.g. App UI, marketing site design, design system for a growing product
Your store works fine until a customer does something the platform's defaults never expected.
Storefront work, custom checkout logic, and the integrations that connect a store to everything else you run.
e.g. Shopify builds, catalogue sync, custom storefronts
The data you need lives on someone else's website, and copy-pasting it every Monday doesn't scale.
Data out of sites that don't want to give it up, cleaned, scheduled, and delivered where your team already works. Built to survive markup changes.
e.g. Price monitoring, lead enrichment, competitor tracking into Sheets or a warehouse
Someone on your team does the same manual process every week and calls it "just how it's done."
The manual process someone does every Monday, turned into something that runs itself and tells you when it breaks.
e.g. Report generation, data sync between tools, internal ops tooling
Starter kits
Every product starts by rebuilding the same plumbing. These are fixed-scope, fixed-price packages that get that part done in two weeks — then roll into the monthly plan, or not.
For a product that needs customers, accounts and payments
Everything every SaaS rebuilds from scratch, done once and done properly — so week three is spent on the part that makes your product different.
For an assistant that answers from your data, not its imagination
A grounded agent you can put in front of customers, with the evaluation and guardrails that decide whether it survives contact with them.
Both are yours outright — your repo, your accounts, your Stripe. Keep going on the monthly plan or take it and run.
Why founders choose this
You don’t need to know how any of it works. Describe the problem the way you would to a colleague — we ask the questions, then build it.
3–6 months
Salary, equity, benefits — before a line ships
Unpredictable
Day rates, change orders, hidden scope
One call, then building
One flat monthly fee, pause or cancel anytime
No job post, no interview rounds, no notice period.
A demo every Friday. Working software at the end of each week, whether the week went well or not. You never wait until the deadline to find out where it stands.
Predictable costs. One flat monthly fee. No hourly billing, no change orders, no invoice you didn't see coming. Pause the month you don't need us.
Senior only. The people who scope your project are the ones who build it. Nothing gets handed down to a junior on a learning budget.
One flat monthly fee. Cancel anytime. You own the code.
Most quotes are a guess with a margin bolted on.
Ours isn’t, because we don’t quote until the scope is written down. That one page is what makes a flat fee honest instead of a bet you pay for later.
Pricing
One flat monthly fee. Pause or cancel anytime. No hourly billing, no change-order games.
Monthly · pause or cancel anytime
$2,000per month
One active build at a time, delivered in order. The plan most founders start on — enough to get a product live and keep it moving.
Monthly · pause or cancel anytime
$3,600per month
Two builds running in parallel and a faster turnaround, for when there is a launch date someone else already committed to.
Monthly · 1 month minimum
from $7,500per month
Dedicated capacity that behaves like a team member — in your standups, on your roadmap, accountable for a slice of the product.
Work
Storefronts, local businesses, dealerships and our own products — all of it in production, all of it open in a new tab so you can judge it yourself.
In their words
Working with FirstEngineer was a great experience from start to finish. They understood that MLO Shoes needed more than a visually good Shopify store—we needed a flexible storefront that could support campaigns, promotions, international customers, and conversion-focused marketing. They built the site with real business needs in mind: collection journeys, sale messaging, countdowns, email capture, and an easy-to-manage promotional setup. Our marketing team can now update campaigns quickly without needing development support for every small change. FirstEngineer combines strong technical knowledge with a practical understanding of D2C e-commerce. They think about speed, customer experience, and how the website can actually help the brand sell more.
FirstEngineer helped us create a website that feels professional, friendly, and easy for patients to use. They quickly understood that our goal was not simply to have an online presence—we needed a website that encouraged prospective patients to call us or request an appointment. They structured the website around the patient journey, from learning about the dentist and available treatments to seeing reviews, financing options, and before-and-after smile results. What stood out was their ability to make technical decisions simple for us. They were thoughtful about local visibility, clear calls to action, and reducing friction for patients. The final website represents our practice much better and has become an important part of how we attract new patients.
FirstEngineer was able to handle the level of complexity our dealership website requires. We have constantly changing new and pre-owned inventory, multiple vehicle categories, finance journeys, service and parts enquiries, and customers who expect to find the right information quickly. They brought a structured approach to the work and understood how important search, inventory accuracy, lead routing, and mobile usability are in the automotive space. Rather than treating the website as a collection of pages, they viewed it as a system that supports sales, service, trade-ins, and customer communication. FirstEngineer is reliable, detail-oriented, and comfortable working across both technical and business requirements. They helped make the digital experience easier for customers while ensuring our team could manage day-to-day changes without unnecessary friction.
FirstEngineer has the ability to take a technically difficult idea and turn it into a product that feels simple to the user. With Scrapebit, the challenge was making web data extraction accessible to people who do not know CSS selectors, scraping infrastructure, or automation tools. They contributed across the complete product journey: the marketing site, core application experience, Chrome extension, data exports, scheduled scraping, authentication, billing, webhooks, and developer integrations. FirstEngineer does not work like a team that only completes development tickets. They think from a product and customer perspective—asking what users need, where they may get stuck, and what will make the product reliable and easier to adopt.
How we work
The date doesn't move, so the scope does. Every week we decide what ships and what waits. You always get working software on the date — the only question is how much is in it.
Your GitHub, your cloud accounts, your API keys. No proprietary runtime, no platform you have to keep paying us for. If we stop working together, nothing breaks.
A demo every Friday, whether the week went well or not. If something is going to slip you find out with weeks left to react, not on the delivery date.
Before you ask
You send requests, we work them one at a time and deploy as we go. Add as many to the queue as you like and reorder them whenever you want — you are paying for a build slot, not a fixed list agreed months ago. Pause the month you don't need us and cancel whenever; there is no notice period.
Then a starter kit or a single month is probably all you should buy. Both starter kits are fixed-scope and fixed-price, and the monthly plan can be cancelled after the first month with nothing owed. We would rather tell you that than sell you a subscription you don't need.
Usually less of it than you think. We'll build AI features where they do something a normal feature can't, and talk you out of them where they only add latency, cost, and a new way to be wrong. A product that works beats one that's “AI-powered”.
Collecting public data generally is, but “generally” is doing real work in that sentence. We'll extract public pages, data you're licensed to access, and your own accounts on third-party platforms. We won't bypass authentication you don't own or touch personal data without a lawful basis. Grey areas get flagged before quoting, not after.
You do, completely, from the first commit. It lives in your GitHub organisation and runs on your accounts. That's true from day one, not on final payment.
Native mobile apps, blockchain, and anything where the plan depends on a platform that has made clear it doesn't want automated access. We'll also turn down work where we don't think the timeline is honest — we'd rather say no than miss a date you've committed to someone else.
Next step
Thirty minutes, free, no proposal. Bring the problem and your deadline. You’ll leave with a scope, a number, and a date — or an honest reason why we’re not the right people.
