Senior engineers - startup pricing
The technical partner your startup can actually afford.
We design, build, and deploy the technical side of your business - websites, product, cloud - at rates a pre-seed budget can survive. You keep the code, the cloud account, and the roadmap.
- No lock-in contracts
- You own the code and the AWS account
- Replies within one business day
Production - us-east-1
- trellis deploy --env production
- build passed in 11.4s
- 34 files synced to s3://northwind-site
- cloudfront invalidation created
- smoke tests passed (12/12)
Type a command, or press Tab to complete one. Up arrow repeats the last.
- Deploy time
- 47s
- Hosting cost
- $1.40 / mo
- Cold start
- 180ms
- 5-10 days
- Median time to first deploy
- 100%
- Code and cloud ownership
- 1 day
- Support response time
For a marketing site with content ready to go.
Your repo, your AWS account, your domain. Always.
On every plan, including the cheapest one.
Why we exist
The usual options all cost too much, one way or another.
Good technical work is expensive because agencies carry sales teams and offices. Cheap technical work is risky because you cannot see who is doing it. We built Trellis to be the third option.
The problem
Agencies quote $40,000 for a website
What we do instead
We do the same build for a fraction of it, because there is no account manager, no sales process, and no office to pay for. You talk to the engineer writing the code.
The problem
Freelance marketplaces are a lottery
What we do instead
Every project gets a written scope, a staging URL in week one, and a senior review before anything ships. You can watch the work happen instead of hoping.
The problem
Hiring in-house takes six months
What we do instead
We start in under a week and keep delivery moving while you hire. When your engineer arrives, we hand over cleanly with documentation and a runbook.
What we do
Everything technical, from the landing page to the cloud bill.
One team for the whole stack. No hand-offs between a design shop, a build shop, and whoever is supposed to deploy it.
What you get
A foundation that is set up properly the first time.
This is the shape of a typical build. Every box below lives in your own AWS account, under your own billing, described by infrastructure-as-code you can read.
You own all of it - the account, the domain, the data, and the code that describes the infrastructure. If you ever leave, nothing is held hostage and nothing has to be rebuilt from scratch.
How it works
Five steps, no surprises, and you can stop at any of them.
Most clients start with a free call and a fixed-price scope. Nothing is billed until you have read exactly what you are buying.
- 30 minutes
Free intro call
You describe the problem. We ask the questions a good engineer would ask. No slide deck, no pitch, no obligation to continue.
- We tell you honestly whether you need us
- We flag anything you could solve cheaper
- You leave with a rough shape and a rough number
- 2-4 days
Written scope and fixed price
You get a short document: what we will build, what it costs, how long it takes, and what is explicitly not included. No hourly surprises.
- Fixed price for fixed scope
- Clear list of assumptions and dependencies
- A start date you can plan around
- Ongoing
Build in the open
Work happens in a repo you can watch from day one. You get a staging link that updates with every change, so there is never a big reveal at the end.
- Shared board with current status
- Staging URL from the first week
- Weekly demo or written update, your choice
- 1-2 days
Ship and hand over
We deploy to your cloud account, set up monitoring and backups, and write down how everything works. Then we walk you through it.
- Infrastructure as code, not manual clicking
- Runbook for the things that break
- Credentials and access in your name
- Monthly or hourly
Support and iterate
Stay on a retainer for continuous delivery, or drop to hourly and call us when you need us. Either is fine, and you can switch at any time.
- One day response time on every plan
- No lock-in and no notice period after the first month
- We hand over cleanly if you hire in-house
Pricing
Rates a pre-seed budget can survive.
Monthly retainers for ongoing work, or fixed prices for a defined project. Either way the number is on the page, not in a discovery call.
Launch
Keep a small site moving without hiring anyone.
$490/month
- Capacity
- 10 hours / month
- Best for
- Pre-seed teams with a landing page or a small site.
- Landing page or small site build
- Hosting, domain, and SSL setup
- Up to 10 hours of changes each month
- Content and copy updates, no ticket process
- Email support, one business day response
- Monthly performance and uptime check
Build
Most popularShip product features every single week.
$1,450/month
- Capacity
- 30 hours / month
- Best for
- Funded teams with a product in active development.
- Everything in Launch
- Full-stack feature development
- CI/CD pipeline and staging environment
- Database design and migrations
- Weekly call and shared delivery board
- Third-party integrations and API work
- Same-day response on urgent issues
Scale
A technical partner embedded in your team.
$2,900/month
- Capacity
- 60+ hours / month
- Best for
- Teams with real users, real traffic, and real deadlines.
- Everything in Build
- Dedicated engineering capacity
- Cloud architecture and cost optimisation
- Observability, alerting, and on-call coverage
- Security and compliance groundwork
- Quarterly roadmap and architecture review
- 4-hour response on production incidents
Questions
The things founders ask us first.
How can you charge so much less than an agency?
Three reasons. We are small, so there is no account manager, no sales team, and no office to pay for. We use managed cloud services instead of servers we have to babysit. And we work remotely for clients anywhere, so we are not competing on the cost of a city desk. The rate is low; the seniority is not.
Who actually does the work?
The same people you meet on the first call. We do not pass work to a junior bench. If a project needs a specialist we do not have, we say so and bring in someone we have worked with before, with your approval.
Do I own the code and the AWS account?
Yes, completely. The repository lives in your organisation, the cloud account is in your name with your billing details, and we work under access you grant and can revoke. If you stop working with us, nothing has to be migrated because nothing was ever ours.
What if I need to pause or stop?
Retainers have no lock-in. After the first month you can pause or cancel with no notice period, and unused hours on a paused month roll forward once. Project work is billed in milestones, so stopping halfway means you only pay for finished milestones.
How quickly can you start?
Usually within a week, sometimes the next day. Small projects like a landing page or an AWS setup can often start immediately. Larger builds get a start date in the scope document so you can plan around it.
Tell us what you are building.
A free 30-minute call, no slide deck and no obligation. If we are not the right fit, we will tell you who is.
or email startups@theaimax.com