Home / Engagements & Pricing
Engagement model & pricing
No hourly billing, no change orders, no surprise invoices. Every engagement is fixed-fee, scoped in writing, and — on PODs — backed by a contractual floor of delivered work.
How engagements work
A scoped 6–12 week engagement to design, build, and ship one defined outcome — a migration, a new platform rollout, an integration program. DAISA-accelerated, senior-led, fully documented.
Most Launch clients convert to a managed POD — that's by design.
A dedicated team of senior experts plus the DAISA platform, running your systems on a governed operating rhythm — the output of a 1–3 person department for one monthly line item.
Shipping to production in week one, every engagement.
POD tiers
Your first systems expert, fractional
Senior expert + DAISA, part-time capacity
Replaces two full-time hires
Architect + delivery experts + DAISA
Replaces four full-time hires
Senior POD + DAISA + integration coverage
Replaces six or more full-time hires
Full POD + fractional CTO-level counsel
Not sure where you land? Tell us what your business needs done — we'll value it honestly and tell you if a POD is overkill.
The hiring math
Move the slider to the team you were planning to hire. Fully-loaded year-one cost versus a Cloud Nerd POD — forward this page to whoever owns the budget.
Fully-loaded year-one cost
⏱ 50–70 days to fill (SHRM) · 6–12 months to full productivity
Everything included in one fixed fee
⚡ Shipping week one — $160,000 less in year one
Sources: ZipRecruiter/Indeed/Glassdoor senior developer & architect salary data for Austin, Dallas & Chicago (2026); BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, Mar 2026 (benefits = 30.1% of total comp); standard IT placement fees of 20% of first-year salary; SHRM time-to-fill benchmarks. Tools & overhead lines are estimates. Your briefing includes math built on your actual plan.
Common questions
A guaranteed minimum of finished, delivered work every month at a fixed fee. Not hours. Not access to a team. Real outcomes, from a senior POD that starts producing day one.
Every business result you need gets a point value — small, medium, large, or XL — and nothing gets valued without your agreement. Your tier buys a set amount of monthly delivery capacity. You get a weekly report of exactly which results were finished, so you can check our math every week.
We get a 30-day window to close the gap. If we still miss, and the miss is ours and not caused by client delays, you get the same percentage of your fees back that we missed by. Cash, not credits.
Three-month initial term, then it renews. Quarterly billing is standard, with 10% off if you prepay the full term. Your price is locked for the term. We flag renewal 60 days out, and a 30-day notice from you stops it.
No. You're reserving the POD's availability for a set period — use it or lose it. In practice, running dry almost never happens: priorities can shift at any time, and any result your business needs is fair game. We'll help you keep the priorities flowing.
They don't exist. That's the point of the model. You set the business priorities, change them any time, and add as much as you like. Nothing becomes a new invoice.
Senior architects and consultants — no junior staffing, no bait-and-switch — multiplied by our DAISA platform. Every deliverable carries a named human owner and a complete audit trail.
A portion of your Launch implementation fee is credited against your first months of a POD contract if you convert within 90 days of go-live. The project is the beginning, not the end — by design.
In one 30-minute briefing we'll value a few of the results your business actually needs, show you the tier that fits, and put a delivery floor on paper — math built on your numbers, not ours.
