Every line below was written because we got burned somewhere — as customers, or as engineers inside someone else's agency. The receipts are real. 下面每一条都是被坑出来的 —— 我们做客户时被坑过,也在别家 agency 做工程师时见过。每一条都有真实的来由。
Big agencies sell you a "principal" on the pitch call and route the work to a junior the next morning. We don't have a principal — we have three senior engineers, every one shipping production code, and one of them is the one writing yours.大 agency 会在提案会上派出"首席"专家,签完合同第二天就把活儿丢给初级工程师。我们没有"首席",只有三位资深工程师,每一位都在写生产环境的代码 —— 写你代码的就是其中之一。
If we ever need a junior pair of hands for a task, that work goes through a senior reviewer before it touches your repo. The training-wheel hours stay on our books.即便偶尔需要初级搭手,代码也要经过资深 review 才能进你的仓库。练手成本由我们自己承担。
3 / 3 engineers · senior levelNo call-center routing. No "your account manager left, here's the new one." Peng is your single point of contact from day one, and the same two engineers stay on your build — Slack, sprint demos, on-call, the works.没有客服分流,没有"你的对接人离职了,以后是这位"。从第一天起 Peng 就是你的唯一对接人,后面跟你项目的也是同一组工程师 —— Slack、迭代演示、紧急响应,全部一手。
The math: a small senior team that has shipped together for years out-paces a ten-person agency assembled the week of kickoff. Continuity beats headcount.这是数学题:一支长期合作的资深小团队,胜过启动前一周拼凑的十人团队。延续性比人头数重要。
same team · since 2014Every proposal is a single page: who, what, how long, how much, and what we will not touch. No "T&M with potential overage", no asterisks, no "subject to clarification".每份提案就一页纸:谁来做、做什么、多久、多少钱、哪些我们 不动。没有"按时计费可能超支",没有星号,没有"细节再议"。
Scope changes get re-quoted in writing before any work happens. Surprises live in the email thread, never in the invoice.需求变更先书面重新报价,确认后才动手。意外只出现在邮件里,绝不会出现在账单上。
fixed price · in writingSlack in Mandarin, Jira in English, code review in either. We don't lose half a meeting waiting for translation, and your spec doesn't drift between languages because the same engineer wrote both versions.Slack 用中文,Jira 用英文,Code Review 用顺手的那种。会议不会被翻译卡掉一半时间,需求文档也不会在两种语言之间走样 —— 因为两个版本是同一个工程师写的。
For CN ⇌ CA cross-border builds, this is the whole team — all three of us live and work bilingually every day. Handoffs land on a real human, in the language you wrote in.中加跨境项目,这是我们整个团队的日常 —— 三个人每天都在用两种语言写代码、开会、沟通。你用哪种写,真人就在那一头接住。
3 / 3 engineers bilingualEvery request gets a human reply, same day — usually within hours, in business time. Overnight requests from CN clients get picked up first thing PT morning. Peng reads everything that comes in.所有请求当日必有真人回复 —— 工作时段内通常几小时内。国内客户晚间发来的,我们第二天一早处理。所有来件,Peng 都亲自看。
Production-down? You have a direct phone number to a senior engineer. No queue, no callback form, no "please describe the issue".生产挂了?你手上有资深工程师的直拨电话。没有排队,没有回呼表单,也没有"请描述一下你的问题"。
direct line to Peng · no queueFirst 30 days of post-launch bug fixes are free, no exceptions, no fine print. After that you can roll into a small monthly retainer or pay by the hour — month-to-month, cancel any time.上线后首 30 天的 bug 修复免费,没有例外,没有小字。之后你可以选小额月费或按小时计费 —— 月度续约,随时停。
No 12-month minimum lock-up. If we stop being useful, you stop paying. That's the entire contract.没有 12 个月最低合约。我们不再有用了,你就停 —— 整份合同就这一句话。
longest client · 12 yrs & countingIf a $40 spreadsheet solves your problem,
we'll say so. 如果 一张 Excel 能解决你的问题,
我们就 直接说。
8-page bilingual site, CMS, contact form, HubSpot integration, deployed to AWS, 12 months of hosting. The bars below show what share of every dollar you'd pay actually buys engineering — versus margin, coordination, or whatever "agency overhead" is supposed to mean. 8 页中英官网、CMS、联系表单、对接 HubSpot、部署到 AWS、12 个月托管。下面的条形,展示你付出去的每一块钱里 —— 有多少真的买到了代码,多少进了利润、协调,以及 agency 那含糊的"间接成本"。
Pulled verbatim from the last fifty discovery calls. The answers are short on purpose. 摘自最近五十通咨询电话。回答故意保持简短。
Because senior engineers cost more, on the front end. They also re-build less, write fewer bugs, and don't need a project manager translating between them and you. Over a 12-month build the total tends to land 20–30% lower than a "cheap" agency quote — but only because nothing blows up in month four.因为资深工程师在前期就贵。但他们少返工、少 bug、也不需要 PM 在中间翻译。一年下来总价通常比"便宜"agency 低 20–30% —— 因为第 4 个月不会爆。
Two-engineer pod, by policy. Every account has at least two senior engineers in the loop on every PR, every infra change, every standup. We've never had a single-keeper-of-knowledge incident in 50+ engagements.每个项目按规定 ≥ 2 人小组。所有 PR、基建变更、每日站会,至少两名资深工程师都在线。50 多个项目里,没出过"知识只在一个人脑子里"的情况。
Both, yes. We're Canadian-incorporated, so PIPEDA applies by default. For CN ⇌ CA builds we add a cross-border data addendum inside the DPA — covering where data sits, who can access it, and how it's handed back if the contract ends. Happy to use your legal team's wording — it's not boilerplate from our side.两份都签。我们是加拿大注册公司,PIPEDA 自动适用。中加跨境项目会在 DPA 里加一段跨境数据附录 —— 说明数据存放在哪、谁能访问、合同结束后怎么交还。条款用你法务出的版本也可以 —— 不是我们这边的模板。
No — they live in your repos and your accounts. AWS / Azure / GCP under your billing. GitHub under your org. We get invited as collaborators, and we leave with empty hands the day you ask.不在 —— 都在你自己的仓库和账号里。AWS / Azure / GCP 走你的账单。GitHub 在你的组织下。我们以协作者身份加入,你说撤,当天就两手空空走人。
You already do. Discovery calls are with the engineer who would lead the work — not a salesperson. If we can't show up to that call, we don't have capacity for your project, and we'll say so.你早就见到了。咨询电话上接你的就是项目带队工程师,不是销售。如果我们排不出这通电话,说明我们当下接不下来 —— 我们会直说。
Roughly 30% of inbound, every year. Wrong fit, wrong timing, wrong tech, or scopes that need someone bigger than us. Saying no is how we keep the team small enough to actually care about the ones we say yes to.每年大约 30% 的咨询会被我们拒掉。方向不对、时机不对、技术不合,或者范围已经超过我们规模能接的极限。学会说"不",才能让团队保持足够小 —— 对说"好"的那些项目真的上心。
Verifiable facts about who we are and how long we've been at it — happy to put any client on the phone with you for a reference. 关于"我们是谁、做了多久"几条可核实的事实 —— 任何一位客户的电话,需要的时候我们都可以给你做引荐。