Six weeks, fixed price, fixed scope. What the Build engagement actually looks like

The Build engagement is the standard package on my pricing page. Six weeks, fixed price, fixed scope, one engineer. Here is the actual shape of those six weeks so you know what you are buying before you sign anything.

Week zero: scope and spec

Before week one starts we run a scope call. Sixty minutes, no slides. By the end of it I will know the shape of the product, the user journeys, the integrations, and the must haves. I write the spec inside 48 hours and you sign one page that locks the scope.

Locked scope is the part founders find scary and the part that protects you. It means change requests are quoted separately so the original budget always holds. The number on the invoice on day one is the number on the invoice on day forty two.

Week one: foundation

• Repo, CI, Vercel project, custom domain wired in
• Postgres provisioned, schema sketched, migrations running
• Clerk auth flow live, sign in working end to end
• Design tokens, base layout, the first three pages styled
• First Loom update on Friday with a working preview URL

Week two and three: core product

This is where the actual product gets built. Dashboards, the main CRUD, the workflows that earn the product its existence. By end of week three you have something you can demo to a real user and get real feedback.

Week four: integrations and payments

Stripe wired up with subscriptions or one off payments, depending on the model. Email transactional flows hooked into Resend. Any third party integrations the product depends on, like Google Calendar, Twilio or a regulator API for compliance work.

Week five: edges, polish, hardening

• Error states, empty states, loading skeletons
• Mobile breakpoints walked through on real devices
• Rate limiting, input validation, auth checks audited
• Performance pass with Lighthouse and real network throttling
• Accessibility pass, focus states, keyboard nav

Week six: launch and handover

Production cutover, DNS, SSL, monitoring, analytics, status page if the product needs one. Full source handed over via your GitHub org, environment variables documented, runbook written, and a 60 minute walkthrough call where I screenshare the entire codebase so your next engineer can land it.

What you get on day 43

• A production Next.js application live on your domain
• A repo you own outright with full commit history
• A README that another senior engineer can pick up in an hour
• Two weeks of post launch bug support included, no extra cost

Why this shape works for UK founders

Most UK SaaS founders I work with are raising, have a board, or have a launch event with a date on it. Fixed scope plus fixed price plus a fixed end date is the only model that protects all three of those constraints at once. Hourly billing protects none of them.