Pricing
Real numbers, published up front
No discovery-call theatre to find out what things cost. Pick a monthly plan for continuous work, or a fixed-price project if you know what you need.
Pricing
Monthly plans
Ongoing work, billed monthly. Pause or cancel any time after the first month.
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
Fixed scope
Project prices, not hourly guesswork
Every project below is quoted as a fixed price for a fixed scope. You see the number before anyone starts writing code.
Landing page
1-2 weeksOne page, designed and built, ready to send traffic to.
From$900
- Design and build
- Lead capture form
- Analytics and SEO basics
- Deployed with SSL
Marketing site
2-4 weeksA complete site with the pages a startup actually needs.
From$2,400
- Up to 7 pages
- Editable content
- Blog or resources section
- Performance and accessibility pass
MVP build
4-8 weeksThe smallest version of your product that someone will pay for.
From$6,500
- Scoping workshop
- Auth, core flow, and admin
- Payments if you need them
- Cloud deployment and monitoring
AWS deployment
1-2 weeksTake what you have and put it on a foundation that holds.
From$1,200
- Account, IAM, and network setup
- Infrastructure as code
- Backups and cost alarms
- Written runbook
Data pipeline & dashboard
2-5 weeksOne trustworthy view of the numbers running your business.
From$3,200
- Source integrations
- Scheduled transforms
- Dashboard build
- Metric documentation
Security review
1-2 weeksFind the holes before a customer or an auditor does.
From$1,100
- Code and infrastructure review
- Secrets and dependency audit
- Prioritised findings
- Fix plan with estimates
Discounts we would rather tell you about
Students and pre-revenue teams
40% off any plan or project while you are pre-revenue. Send us your student email or just tell us where you are.
Open source and public good
We keep one discounted slot open each quarter for open-source maintainers and non-profits. Ask if that is you.
Equity is not required
We work for money, not equity. If cash is genuinely the constraint, tell us the number you can afford and we will scope to it.
Estimate
Price it yourself before you talk to anyone.
Three controls, one honest ballpark. It is a starting point, not a quote - the real number comes out of a scope, and it is usually inside this range.
Count the distinct screens: home, pricing, about, and so on.
Payments, CRM, an existing API, a booking system, email tooling.
Ballpark
$3,050–$4,150
- Base build
- $1,600
- Additional pages (4)
- $1,040
- Integrations (1)
- $480
- Timeline · Within a month
- +15%
The usual shape of a project like this. Start inside two weeks.
Send this to usOpens the enquiry form with these numbers already written in. You can edit anything before sending.
- Excludes third-party costs: your AWS usage, domains, and paid software.
- Assumes content and brand assets exist, or that you are happy with ours.
- A scope call usually moves the number by less than 10% - and it can move it down.
Where the money goes
How the rate can be this low without being cheap.
If the work is the same, why is the number different? Because almost none of a large-agency invoice is engineering.
- The engineer doing the work72%One senior engineer, paid properly, on your project. Not a junior with a senior on the masthead.
- Cloud, tooling, and licences6%Our own AWS, repository, monitoring, and design tooling. Your infrastructure is billed to your account, not marked up here.
- Insurance, accounting, and the boring17%Professional indemnity, contracts, an accountant, and the time it takes to keep a small company legitimate.
- Margin5%Kept deliberately thin, because the alternative is a sales layer, and we would rather do the work.
Large agencies carry account management, business development, and utilisation targets that keep the clock running whether or not the work is done. That overhead is the difference you are paying for.
Freelance marketplaces push all of the coordination and delivery risk onto you, which is fine until the deliverable is a production system with a deadline attached.
We sit between the two on price and take neither of those shortcuts: senior engineers, no sales layer, and a written scope before anything starts.
Shares are of a typical invoice and are shown so you can check the arithmetic. Ask us for the underlying numbers on a call and we will show you the model.
Honest comparison
How we sit between an agency and a marketplace
We are not the cheapest option available, and we are not trying to be. Here is where the money actually goes.
| Typical agency | Freelance marketplace | Trellis | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who you talk to | Account manager | A stranger, each time | The engineer doing the work |
| Cloud / AWS depth | Usually outsourced | Hit or miss | Core part of the service |
| Code and cloud ownership | Often restricted | Varies | Yours from day one |
| Time to start | 3-6 weeks | Days | Under a week |
| After launch | New statement of work | Whoever is available | Ongoing retainer or hourly |
| Senior review of your code | Included | You are on your own | Included, every time |
Pricing questions
What founders ask before signing anything
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.
I am not technical. Will I understand what you are doing?
That is most of our clients. Every update is written in plain language, every decision comes with a reason and a trade-off, and nothing ships without you being able to explain what it does. If you ever want more detail, we will go as deep as you like.
What time zones do you cover?
We are remote-first and deliberately spread across US, EU, and APAC hours. Every plan includes at least four hours of overlap with your working day, and the Scale plan includes on-call coverage outside standard hours.
Do you sign NDAs and custom contracts?
Yes. We will sign your NDA before the first technical conversation, and we are happy to work under your MSA, your invoicing process, and your security requirements. We also have a plain-language template if you would rather not involve lawyers yet.
What happens if something breaks after launch?
Launch includes 30 days of bug fixes at no cost, regardless of plan. After that, everyone gets the same one-business-day response time, and Scale clients get four-hour incident response. We also set up monitoring before handover, so usually we know before you do.
Can you take over a project someone else started?
Often, yes. We start with a short paid audit - usually a day or two - to assess the codebase, the infrastructure, and the risk. You get a written report and an honest recommendation, including telling you to keep the existing team if they are doing fine.
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