What do we mean by software development on tap?
Key takeaways
Turn it on when you need it, off when you don't, and pay for the work you asked for. What the on tap model actually means, what it costs you, and where it is the wrong answer.
Most software companies sell you one of two things. A retainer, where you pay every month whether you need anything or not. Or a project, where you agree a big number up front, sign for all of it, and find out later what it really cost.
Neither of those is built around what you actually need. They are built around what is convenient to sell.
Software development on tap is the third option. You turn it on when you need something doing, you turn it off when you don't, and you pay for the work you asked for. Nothing else.
Here is exactly what that means in practice.
Turn it on when you need it
There is nothing to set up and nothing to join. No onboarding call, no minimum term, no account manager assigned to you.
When something needs doing, you describe it in plain English. You do not need to know whether it is a database problem or a front-end problem, and you do not need to translate it into technical language first. That translation is our job, and frankly it is the part most people find hardest about dealing with developers.
We read it, we work out how big it is, and we come back with a price and a number of tokens. Nothing starts until you say yes.
That is the whole activation process. You had an idea on a Tuesday, and by the time you have finished your coffee it is described and sent.
Turn it off when you don't
This is the part that separates on tap from a retainer, and it is the part worth understanding properly.
When you have nothing that needs doing, you pay nothing. There is no monthly fee ticking along in the background. There is no contract with a notice period. There is no conversation where we try to talk you into keeping the arrangement alive.
Quiet quarter? You spend nothing. Busy month before a trade show? Send us six jobs. Then nothing again until spring.
If you have bought tokens up front and not used them, they sit on your account until you do. Tokens never expire. We are not running a gym membership where the profit comes from the months you do not turn up.
Pay for what you use, and no more
Every piece of work is graded into tokens before anything happens. A small job is around 5 tokens. A medium one is around 15. A large one is around 25. You see the token count and the price before you commit to anything, and that price is what you pay.
Three things follow from that, and they are the three things people find hardest to believe at first.
There is no hourly billing. If a job takes us longer than we expected, that is our problem, not your invoice. You agreed a price for a piece of work, not for a quantity of our time. Nobody is watching a clock on your behalf and nobody is padding an estimate to be safe.
There are no surprises at the end. The number you approved is the number. Not "approximately", not "plus VAT and contingency", not "subject to scope". If the work turns out to be bigger than it looked, we come back and tell you before we do it, not after.
You are never paying for capacity you did not use. A retainer sells you a block of availability and quietly keeps whatever you leave on the table. On tap has no table to leave anything on.
Approving a job is what pays for it. Tokens come out of your balance at the moment you approve, so "approved" and "paid for" are the same event. There is no invoice arriving three weeks later for something you had half forgotten agreeing to.
Go at your own pace, to your budget
This is the bit that matters most to smaller businesses, and it is the reason we built the model this way.
You decide the order. You decide the speed. You decide how much you spend this month, and you can decide something different next month without a conversation about it.
If your budget this quarter is one job, do one job. If a customer complaint makes something urgent, move it to the front. If money is tight in January, do nothing in January. The work waits, your tokens wait, and nobody chases you.
Compare that with a fixed-price project, where the entire scope is agreed on day one — at exactly the moment you know least about what you actually need. You are asked to commit to decisions before you have the information to make them, and then you pay to change them later. It is a strange way to buy anything.
Going a job at a time means you learn as you go. The third thing you ask for is usually better specified than the first, because by then you have seen the first one working.
What it is not
Being straight about the limits is more useful than pretending there are none.
It is not unlimited. You are buying specific pieces of work, not a developer on standby. If you need someone available at four in the morning for a system that cannot go down, you need a support contract, and that is a different thing that we handle separately.
It is not a subscription. There is no monthly allowance to use or lose. We removed that model deliberately, because it made people rush work they were not ready for in order to avoid wasting an allowance.
It is not the cheapest possible hour of development. You can find cheaper. What you are paying for here is a fixed price, work that is tested before you see it, and thirty years of judgement about which of the things you asked for will cause you a problem in eighteen months. A small job gets the same care as a platform handling millions of pounds a month.
How it works, start to finish
- You describe what you need. Plain English, no technical translation required. The get a price form takes about a minute.
- We grade it. A real person reads it and sizes it into tokens. Not an algorithm, and not a salesperson.
- You get a price. Token count, cost, and what we understood you to be asking for, so you can correct us if we have it wrong.
- You approve, or you don't. Approving is what pays for it. Not approving costs nothing and nobody follows up with a phone call.
- We build it, test it, and hand it over. Into your repository, on your hosting, under your accounts.
You own the code at every stage. That is not a perk we are advertising, it is the baseline. Being locked out of your own software is how a surprising number of people end up needing a rescue in the first place.
Who this suits
It suits you if you have software that needs a steady trickle of attention rather than a big project. It suits you if you have been burned by an open-ended arrangement before. It suits you if your budget is real and finite and you need to see the number before you spend it.
It suits you particularly well if you have inherited something, or been let down by whoever built it, and you need someone to take a look without signing up to anything first.
It suits you less well if you genuinely need a full-time development team embedded in your business. If that is you, say so and we will tell you honestly, because selling you a token model when you need a team helps neither of us.
The short version
Turn it on when you need it. Turn it off when you don't. Pay for what you use and not a penny more. Go at whatever pace your budget allows, and change your mind about that pace whenever you like.
That is what we mean by software development on tap.
If you have something in mind, tell us what you need and we will come back with a price. If you would rather look at the numbers first, the rates are on the one-off jobs and ongoing work pages. And if what you actually have is a project that has gone wrong, start here instead.