Questions founders ask
before hiring us.

rot8 Studio is a European product engineering studio for startups and product teams. We design and build custom software end-to-end — web, mobile, native iOS and Android — for founders raising or recently-raised, and for existing teams that need senior leverage fast. We work on three projects per quarter and have shipped 47 products to date.

rot8 is for funded founders (pre-seed through Series B), non-technical operators with a product to build, and existing product teams that need senior leverage now. We are not for pre-funding ideation, brand campaigns, marketing-only sites, pure offshore body-shopping, or projects we can't deliver on with our own team. We say no often.

Freelancers are individuals working in parallel, usually without a designer-engineer pairing or shared codebase ownership. rot8 is one senior team that designs, engineers, and ships together — same Linear, same code review, same accountability. You don't manage the integration; we do. For projects under €15,000 a freelancer is often the right call.

Larger agencies optimize for scale — bench depth, capability tag count, multi-region offices. rot8 optimizes for senior depth at boutique scale: under 30 heads, three projects per quarter, no juniors on your team. We're not the right call when you need 15 engineers staffed in 30 days. We are the right call when you need a senior pod that ships.

Hiring your first five engineers takes 9–15 months and clears €400,000 before a single line of production code. rot8 gives you a senior team by Monday — shipping in week two, handing you the keys when you're ready. You buy velocity now and headcount later, when the product justifies the team. See engineering studio vs in-house hiring.

We take on web applications, mobile applications (native iOS and Android), MVPs from sketch to production, embedded engineering pods inside existing teams, architecture spikes, migrations, and technical rescues. Common sectors: fintech, marketplace, consumer, health. We don't do brand campaigns, marketing-only sites, ad creative, or pure offshore augmentation.

We publish three engagement minimums: Sprint (2 weeks fixed scope) from €15,000, Ship (8–16 week MVP) from €60,000, and Embed (monthly senior pod) from €18,000/month. Final price comes from a one-week paid discovery sprint (€8,000, credits to the build). We don't bill hourly. See pricing for the full shape.

Most MVPs ship in 8–16 weeks from kickoff. The shorter end is a single-platform product with a small integration surface. The longer end adds native mobile, complex domain models, or multi-tenant architecture. We commit to the timeline at the end of the discovery sprint and protect it with bi-weekly demos and production deploys from week three.

We default to boring, scalable, well-documented tools — typed languages, modern web frameworks, relational databases, mainstream cloud — and pick the specific stack to fit the problem and your team. Native mobile is Swift and Kotlin. For Embedengagements we adapt to your stack — we've shipped across most mainstream language, framework, and cloud combinations.

The team is European, distributed across Western and Central Europe (CET, CEST). We work primarily in CET working hours and overlap with North American Eastern time in the morning and Western time in the afternoon. For globally-distributed clients we adapt — most clients work async after the daily overlap window.

Yes. We're a European company, GDPR-native. Client data and code live on infrastructure agreed in the engagement contract — typically your AWS/GCP/Vercel account, with rot8 access scoped to engineering necessity. We sign DPAs (data processing agreements) by default for engagements where we touch personal data. We do not move client data to our infrastructure.

Yes. Standard mutual NDA, your template or ours. We sign before any real technical or financial disclosure — typically before the first scoping call, sometimes before the first email exchange if your industry demands it. We don't sign NDAs to receive a sales pitch (that's a misuse), but for any genuine product disclosure, NDA first, conversation after.

You raise it in the bi-weekly demo or directly with the named lead — not at the next monthly review. We adjust scope, team composition, or cadence within the engagement, in writing. If the engagement is the wrong fit and can't be salvaged, we end it cleanly with a 2-week wind-down at no additional cost and hand off everything we've built.

No. We take cash because it's the only honest way to price engineering work — equity introduces incentive mismatches at exactly the moment we should be cutting scope to ship. We've made zero exceptions in three years. We like our clients but we're not co-founders. If equity is the only path your stage allows, we're not the right partner.

Fill out the four-step form at /apply— about five minutes. We respond to 100% of applications within 48 hours, every time, with a real reply from a named founder. The response is yes, no, or “let's talk.” If yes, the next step is a 30-minute scoping call. We work on three projects per quarter, so apply early.