Skip to content
Futurist Labs

How we work

Fixed price. Senior people. Working software every week.

Most software projects go wrong in the same three places: nobody agreed what was being built, the price was an estimate that kept growing, and the client saw nothing until the end. Every part of how we work exists to remove one of those.

The Futurist Labs team

You know the price before we start

Every engagement begins with a short paid step: an audit, a triage or a discovery. It produces a written scope and a fixed price. The scope is yours whether or not you continue with us, and the fee comes off the price if you do.

From there the price does not move unless you change what you asked for. When you do, we price the change first and you decide. We do not bill by the hour or the day, and you never get a surprise invoice.

  • Budget for changes. For larger builds we can set aside a change budget alongside the fixed price, so you can say yes to a good idea mid-build without a new contract.
  • If we underestimate, that is our cost. It is what makes us careful in discovery.

From first call to handover

  1. Free 30-minute call.

    You show us what you have or describe what you need. We tell you whether we are the right team and which engagement fits. If we are not, we say so.

  2. Paid first step.

    Audit, triage or discovery. One to two weeks at most. You get a written report, a scope and a fixed quote.

  3. Kickoff.

    Contract signed, deposit paid, repositories and environments set up in your name. The team starts the following Monday.

  4. Build.

    A working release into staging every week. A short written update every week. A 30-minute call every week. No sprints to wait for and no big reveal at the end.

  5. Launch and handover.

    Testing, production release, a walkthrough of the architecture and deployment for your team, and transfer of every account and credential. Then 30 days of support for questions.

Senior engineers directing AI, not the other way around

We use AI tools throughout delivery, and it is a large part of why a small senior team now ships what used to need a team of six. It is also why we can price fixed.

  • What AI does:

    scaffolding, boilerplate, test generation, documentation, repetitive refactoring, first drafts of routine code.

  • What people do:

    architecture, product decisions, security, integrations, anything where a wrong answer costs you money. Every line that ships is reviewed by a senior engineer. No exceptions.

  • What it means for you:

    the price includes all AI tooling. Your code and data stay in your repositories and environments, and we will walk your security team through how we work before we start.

We run our own products this way

The surest sign that a method works is using it on your own money. These are products we designed, built and operate:

See the portfolio

So the first conversation is honest

  • Hourly or daily rates. Fixed price only, or a monthly retainer with a defined deliverable.
  • Staff augmentation. We deliver outcomes, not people by the week.
  • Proprietary frameworks. Nothing you have to keep paying us for.
  • Bait and switch. The people in the discovery are the people on the build.
  • Promises we cannot keep. If we are not sure we can ship what you need, we say so and turn the work down.

If that is how you want to work, let's talk.

Book a free 30-minute call