Priced Per Developer, Per Month or Per Hour
There is no project cost here, because you are not buying a project. You are buying a person’s time and judgement, and that is priced by role, seniority and how scarce the stack is. All figures in US dollars and all indicative.
Indicative Monthly Rates, Per Developer
Full-time, one client, the agreed working window. Seniority here means what somebody can be left alone with, not how many years are on the CV.
Mid-level developer
$3,200–$4,400 / month
Indicative. Ships well-defined features independently and asks good questions when the ticket is ambiguous.
- Takes a ticket to a merged pull request without supervision
- Comfortable in an existing codebase and its conventions
- Needs an architectural steer on anything genuinely new
- Best when you have someone senior reviewing the work
Senior developer
$4,800–$6,400 / month
Indicative. Owns a feature area end to end, reviews other people’s work and pushes back when a requirement is wrong.
- Designs before building, and says what they are not building yet
- Debugs production problems in code somebody else wrote
- Raises the standard of the pull requests around them
- The right first hire when there is nobody senior on your side
Lead or architect
$7,000–$9,000 / month
Indicative. Makes the decisions that are expensive to reverse and carries other developers alongside their own work.
- Owns architecture, data modelling and the migration path
- Runs code review and technical direction for a small group
- Writes decisions down so the reasoning outlives the engagement
- Often better value part-time than full-time on a small team
These are indicative bands, not a quote. The figure for your role is confirmed once we understand the stack, the hours, the overlap you need and how long the engagement is likely to run. Nothing on this page is a price you can hold us to before that conversation, and nothing after it moves without thirty days notice in writing.
Part-Time Rates, Billed Against a Log
Hourly work carries a premium over the monthly equivalent, and it is worth knowing why rather than assuming it is opportunism.
Mid-level
$25–$34 / hour
Indicative. Suits steady maintenance work and well-specified features on a product that is not changing shape every week.
Senior
$35–$48 / hour
Indicative. The most common part-time arrangement, usually around twenty hours a week across four or five days.
Lead or architect
$50–$68 / hour
Indicative. Frequently the best-value part-time hire: a day a week of senior review and architectural direction alongside your own team.
Why hourly costs more per hour
Two reasons, both structural. A part-time developer rebuilds context at the start of every session, so a proportion of each block is spent getting back to where they were. And a half-allocated person is harder for us to keep fully engaged between clients, which is a cost that has to sit somewhere.
Hours are logged and the log comes with the invoice. There is no rounding up to the nearest half day and no minimum daily charge. The practical minimum is around forty hours in total, because below that the engagement is mostly onboarding. Where part-time is the right answer and where it is false economy is set out on engagement models.
Why Two Developers at the Same Level Can Cost Different Amounts
Rates track availability, not difficulty. A framework being harder to learn does not make its developers expensive; there being fewer of them does.
Broadest supply
React, Node with Express, and TypeScript alongside either. These sit at the middle of the bands above. Plenty of candidates, which means we can be selective on quality rather than grateful for availability.
Tighter supply
Vue and React Native both have noticeably smaller pools of genuinely experienced people, and React Native in particular thins out fast once you require somebody who has shipped through store review and debugged a native module. Expect a premium at the same seniority.
One consequence worth planning around: if your product is on a scarcer stack, the three-day profile cycle is the part most likely to stretch. We will tell you that on day one rather than sending a weaker match to protect the date.
Projects Priced as Projects
The one part of this business that carries a price rather than a rate. Quoted before work starts, staged, and delivered against a written definition of done.
Code audits
Priced from the size of the codebase and the depth you want. A focused audit of a single service or frontend is typically a few thousand dollars; a full review of a substantial product with infrastructure and data model included costs several times that.
You get a written findings report either way, and no obligation to hire anybody afterwards. For most clients an audit costs a fraction of one month of headcount and answers a question that would otherwise be answered slowly and expensively by the first hire.
Migrations and modernisation
Quoted in phases rather than as one number, because nobody can price the whole of a migration honestly before seeing the code. The first phase is small and definite: assess, agree the order of work, convert a representative slice and confirm the estimate for the rest.
The same applies to legacy modernisation. If somebody quotes a full migration from a repository description alone, the number contains a large amount of contingency and you are paying for their uncertainty.
API builds
Priced against an agreed contract: the endpoints, the auth model, the pagination and error shapes, and the documentation that ships with it. A small, well-specified API is genuinely fixed-price work. One where the resource model is still being argued about is not, and we will say so.
Performance work
Usually sold as a fixed measurement phase followed by an estimated fix phase. Measuring is predictable and can be priced; fixing depends entirely on what the measurement finds, and quoting both together before anyone has looked would be a guess with a decimal point on it.
What the Rate Covers and What It Never Covers
The second list matters more than the first, because that is where surprise invoices come from at other suppliers.
The developer and everything behind them
- Their machine, connectivity and standard development tooling
- Our sourcing and vetting overhead, and the shortlist itself
- Contract handling, invoicing and being the legal counterparty
- The replacement guarantee inside the first two weeks
- Indian payroll, statutory costs and employment administration
Costs that are yours, passed through at cost if at all
- Licences and seats on your own software, from design tools to issue trackers
- Cloud, hosting and infrastructure bills, including anything spun up for your work
- Third-party API usage, paid data sources and transactional messaging
- Travel, accommodation and visa costs if you ever want somebody on site
- Managed or company-issued hardware, if your security policy requires it
Where we are asked to arrange something on the second list, it is passed through at cost with the receipt attached. We do not put a margin on your cloud bill, and we do not charge a setup fee, a recruitment fee on signature, or a fee for the shortlist you decided against.
Invoicing, Currency and What Changes a Rate
Everything is invoiced in US dollars by bank transfer. Monthly engagements are invoiced monthly; hourly engagements are invoiced monthly in arrears with the hour log attached, so you can see where the time went rather than taking a single number on trust. Payment terms are agreed in the contract before the start date rather than appearing on the first invoice.
Fixed-scope work is staged, typically part on signature and the remainder on delivery of the report or the agreed milestone. For a longer migration, each phase is invoiced as it completes, so you are never paying far ahead of what has actually been done.
A rate does not change during an engagement without thirty days notice in writing, and in practice it changes for two reasons only: the role materially grows, or the engagement renews after a long run. Neither happens by surprise on an invoice.
Contracts and IPA Web Page Cannot Quote You
Every figure above is indicative. It tells you whether we are in the same range as your budget, which is the only useful thing a public price can do. Your actual rate is confirmed after a conversation about the role, the stack, the hours, the overlap you need and how long the work is likely to run — and then it is written into a contract before anybody starts.
We will not send a fixed quote for a person we have not been briefed on, and you should treat any supplier who does with some suspicion: either the number is padded to cover what they do not know, or it will be revised once they find out. Neither is a good start.
If your budget is below the bottom of these bands, say so early and we will tell you honestly whether a smaller number of hours at the right seniority would work better than a full-time hire at the wrong one. Sometimes the answer is that we are not the right supplier, and that is a five-minute conversation rather than a month of proposals.
Questions About Cost and Payment
Why are these rates ranges rather than a fixed price list?
Because a developer is not a product with a catalogue number. The rate moves with seniority, with how scarce the stack is, with the hours involved and with the length of the engagement. A page quoting one figure per role would either be padded to cover the worst case or quietly revised upward once we understood the work. The bands here are an honest account of where the number usually lands.
What is actually included in the monthly rate?
The developer time for the agreed hours, their equipment and connectivity, our overhead for sourcing and vetting, contract handling and invoicing, and the two-week replacement guarantee. There is no separate management fee, no setup fee and no recruitment fee on signature. You are not charged for the shortlist either, including when you interview all three candidates and hire none of them.
What is never included in the rate?
Anything that belongs on your side of the arrangement: software licences and seats on your own tools, cloud and infrastructure bills, third-party API charges, paid data sources, and travel or visa costs if you ever want somebody on site. If we are asked to arrange any of it, it is passed through at cost with the receipt attached rather than marked up.
Why does the rate differ between one JavaScript stack and another?
Supply. There are considerably more strong React developers available than strong Vue or React Native developers, so the scarcer stacks carry a premium at the same level of seniority. It is a fact about the market rather than a judgement about which framework is harder, and we would rather explain it than hide it inside a single blended rate.
How does payment work?
Monthly engagements are invoiced monthly in US dollars by bank transfer, on terms agreed in the contract before the start date. Hourly engagements are invoiced monthly in arrears with the hour log attached. Fixed-scope work is staged, usually part on signature and the rest on delivery of the report or the agreed milestone. No rate changes mid-engagement without thirty days notice in writing.
Get a Real Number for Your Role
Tell us the stack, the seniority and the hours. You get profiles within three business days and a confirmed rate alongside them.