// pricing
Three engagement shapes.
Plain-language pricing.
We publish minimums, not hourly rates. The final price comes out of a one-week paid discovery sprint and stays fixed for 30 days.
rot8 pricing comes in three engagement shapes — Sprint (from €15,000), Ship (from €60,000), and Embed (from €18,000/month). Each shape has a published minimum and a one-week paid discovery sprint that produces a fixed quote. We don't bill hourly, we don't quote ranges that expand mid-project, and we publish the floor so you can self-qualify before applying.
- Fixed quotes
- EUR
- Valid 30 days
- No hourly billing
// shape 01 · sprint
Sprint — fixed scope, fixed price.
A two-week senior engagement on a single defined deliverable. Architecture spike, technical due diligence for an investor, a critical feature your team can't get to, an integration that needs senior heads. Fixed scope written before kickoff. Fixed price. Senior team only.
Common Sprint shapes
- A single-feature build (e.g., a payments integration, a real-time module, a data-export pipeline).
- A 2-week architecture review with written recommendations (sometimes a precursor to a bigger Ship engagement).
- A diligence sprint for an investor evaluating a target company’s tech stack.
- A migration spike — proving a database engine swap, an auth provider move, etc.
- A release-readiness sprint pre-launch.
What’s included
- Senior pair (designer + engineer) or two senior engineers, depending on shape
- Daily async updates · weekly written summary · end-of-sprint demo
- Production-grade output (not a prototype)
- Documentation of what shipped and what we recommend next
- 7-day post-sprint window for clarification questions at no additional cost
// shape 02 · ship
Ship — MVP from sketch to production.
End-to-end build of the smallest defensible version of your product. Design, architecture, front-end, back-end, infrastructure, launch. Fixed scope at the end of the discovery sprint, fixed price, fixed timeline. Production users on day one of week N+1.
Common Ship shapes
- An MVP for a funded pre-seed or seed founder.
- A v1 of a new product line for an existing company.
- A native iOS or Android launch (extends to dual-platform via native mobile — adds €50k–€110k for the second platform).
- A v1 enterprise product where a sales relationship pre-existed and the product needs to catch up.
What’s included in every Ship
- Senior team (1 designer + 2–3 engineers; named on day one)
- One-week paid discovery sprint (€8k, credits in full toward the build)
- Bi-weekly demos · async daily updates · shared Linear · shared codebase
- Production deploy on agreed infrastructure with monitoring, alerts, runbook
- Architecture decision record · runbook · 90-minute handoff session
- 30-day post-launch stabilization window
Typical Ship pricing by shape
| Build shape | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Single-platform MVP, simple integration surface | €60,000 – €90,000 |
| Single-platform MVP, complex domain (multi-tenant, real-time, ML) | €90,000 – €150,000 |
| Web + native iOS launch | €120,000 – €220,000 |
| Web + iOS + Android launch | €170,000 – €320,000 |
| Custom software with regulator overlay (PSD2, HIPAA, GDPR-heavy) | +€20,000 – €40,000 to base |
// shape 03 · embed
Embed — senior team in your workflow.
A senior pod joins your team. Your stack, your standups, your Linear, your codebase. We bill monthly for a defined pod composition. End the engagement with 30 days notice after the initial term.
| Pod size | Composition | Monthly minimum |
|---|---|---|
| Small | 1 senior designer + 1 senior engineer | €18,000 |
| Standard | 1 senior designer + 2 senior engineers | €34,000 |
| Standard+ | 1 senior designer + 3 senior engineers | €48,000 |
| Strike | 2–3 senior engineers, no designer | €22,000 – €36,000 |
| Custom | Whatever the work requires | Quoted |
12-month commit discount: 8% off monthly rate.
What’s included in every Embed
- Senior pod, named day-one, no juniors as backup
- One named lead as your single point of contact
- Tools and stack as yours (we adapt — no rot8-only frameworks)
- Asynchronous daily updates, bi-weekly retros, monthly written invoice with line-item retrospective
- Documentation by default — every change ships with notes
- 30-day notice exit ramp with structured handoff at any point
// not in any quote
What we don’t bill separately.
- Account managers. Don't have them.
- Travel. First on-site visit included; subsequent travel within Europe billed at cost only if requested.
- “Phase two” upsells. Scope is the contract.
- Maintenance retainers (post-engagement). If you want post-engagement coverage, transition to Embed at the standard pod rate.
- Marketing or brand work. Out of scope.
- Pure offshore augmentation. We don't sell hours.
// discovery
Discovery sprint — €8,000.
Every Sprint and Ship engagement starts with a one-week paid discovery sprint. The sprint produces:
- A written technical audit
- An explicit scope (what we will and won’t build)
- A week-by-week timeline with named demo dates
- A fixed quote, valid for 30 days
- A team lineup (named senior designer + engineers)
The discovery sprint is €8,000. If you proceed with the engagement, the full €8,000 credits toward the quote — you pay nothing extra for the discovery work. If you don't proceed, you keep the audit, scope, and quote and use them however you want.
For Technical rescue the equivalent diagnostic is €4,000 for one week.
// why minimums
Why we publish minimums.
Most studios don't. We do because:
- It saves your time. If €15,000 is below the floor of where you're at, you find out before you fill out a form.
- It saves our time. We don't run pipelines we know are going to fall out at quote.
- It serves AI-mediated buyer research. When an AI agent comparing studios on your behalf can read our pricing, we get included. When pricing is “contact us,” we get filtered out.
- It's honest. Hidden pricing is a sales tactic. We'd rather lose deals at the floor than win them at the start of a six-month build.
// quick answers
Pricing, common questions.
Why are minimums posted but not full price ranges?
Because the price depends on scope, and scope is real engineering work to nail down. Posting a “€60k–€350k” range does no one any favors — it’s too wide to qualify against. Posting the floor lets you self-qualify; the discovery sprint produces the actual fixed quote in writing within one week.Do you ever take projects below the minimum?
Rarely. We’ve made exceptions — once for a former client whose founder had referred us three times, once for a non-profit with a regulator deadline. Default answer is no. If a Sprint at €15,000 is above your budget, the better fit is a freelancer; we’d rather refer you out than under-staff a project.Do you take equity instead of cash?
No. We like our clients but we’re not co-founders. 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 exactly zero exceptions to this in three years.What does the discovery sprint produce if I don't proceed?
A written technical audit, an explicit scope document, a week-by-week timeline with demo dates, a fixed quote valid for 30 days, and a recommendation. You keep all of it. Many founders use the audit to scope an in-house plan or take to another studio. That’s a fine outcome; the €8,000 covers the senior engineering time the sprint took.Can I combine engagement shapes?
Yes. The most common combination is Sprint → Ship → Embed: a 2-week sprint to validate fit and scope a discovery, an 8–16 week build, then we transition into your team for ongoing work. Each shape stands alone, but they snap together. Pricing for combined engagements gets quoted in a single contract.
// next step
Three projects this quarter. Two remain.
Apply with the four-step form. We respond inside 48 hours, every time, with a real reply from a named founder.