Every one of these started small.
Not one of these began as a big contract. They started as a single engineer on a first project — and grew, over years, into the work you see here. The model rewards clients who start small and stay long.
Most engagements run $40–$50 per hour — about $6,400–$8,000 per developer per month, with every dollar on the record. But the rate is the easy part. The harder, more useful question is how a working relationship begins, and how it grows.
Every dollar you pay us is allocated against a fixed internal structure. Not a suggestion. A rule. It is what makes long-term partnerships economically possible — for both sides.
Goes directly to the person writing your code. Salary, benefits, the things that keep senior engineers from leaving after eighteen months. In most agencies this is the line most commonly squeezed. We do not squeeze it.
Your dedicated relationship manager — not a middleman, a business operator with real authority. This line is what makes a ten-, fifteen-, eighteen-year engagement continuous rather than a series of reboots.
Recruitment, onboarding, compliance, HR, tooling, quality, operations. Capped at twenty percent, transparently. If this quietly grew to thirty, the first two numbers would have to shrink — so we keep it at twenty.
The split isn't a discount. It's what produces an engineer who treats your business as his own — and stays for years.
Clients think fixed price buys certainty. What it actually buys is a team that stops telling you the truth.
A fixed price can give you a single certain number. But it also means we can only deliver exactly what was signed — even when, halfway through, we find a better way to build it. Once there's trust, you're paying for our time and our judgment — and that's when we say what we really think, and the software gets better for it.
The most expensive mistake in software services is the one the client cannot see: turnover. Keeping the same team on a mission-critical system for eighteen years — and counting — is not a cost-saving strategy. It is the entire strategy.
Most of our long-running partnerships began with a small, bounded first project. Not a free pilot, not a sales demo — a real, fixed-price piece of work that lets both sides find out how it feels to build together.
You often don't have time to define the work in detail — so we'll do it. We take a meaningful slice of what you need, scope it, fix the price, and deliver it.
And here's the honest part: under a fixed price, we deliver exactly what we agreed to. Along the way you'll see the real complexity inside the work — and the places where the requirement could actually be better than first imagined. That's the moment most clients understand why we don't run long engagements on fixed price. When you pay for our time instead, we say what we really think, and the software gets better for it.
So Start Small isn't just a small project. It's how trust begins — and how you find out whether we're right for you before committing to anything larger.
One model — a senior engineer who reports to you and owns the outcome. What changes is the shape of the commitment, matched to what you actually need.
Every one of these started small.
Not one of these began as a big contract. They started as a single engineer on a first project — and grew, over years, into the work you see here. The model rewards clients who start small and stay long.
If your question isn't here, email hello@core70.com and we'll answer it directly.
Because engagements are shaped by real variables — seniority, stack, region, engagement length. A rate card would force us to quote the top of the range to everyone, or commit to numbers we cannot honestly deliver on. The range above is the honest answer: this is where the majority of our engagements land.
When the role requires an engineer based in a higher-cost market, or when seniority exceeds what the main range supports (lead architect, principal engineer). Both are uncommon. We will tell you in the first conversation whether your request is in or out of the main range.
The engineer's time, technical delivery, and the coordination, delivery management, and quality assurance the engineer handles directly — not a separate project manager or QA layer billed on top. Also included: the infrastructure for collaboration. Not included: third-party licenses, cloud spend passed through at cost, and travel if the engagement requires on-site presence.
The 70/10/20 structure already builds long-term continuity into the default pricing. We do not discount the 70% — that goes to engineers whose cost does not fall with scale. Where scale produces efficiency is in the 20% overhead layer, and those efficiencies are passed through as a matter of course, not negotiated.
Standard notice is thirty days on either side. No long lock-ins. If you need to scale down or pause, the flexible team model — which in some of our engagements has moved between five and twenty engineers depending on season — is designed for exactly that.
If what you want is a single fixed number, delivered once, with no intention of building a longer relationship — a fixed price can give you that, and there are firms who do it well. We're probably not the one. That's genuinely okay.
But if you're open to starting small and seeing how we actually work — an engineer who talks to you directly, owns the outcome, and tells you the truth about your software — then we'll earn your trust the only way it can be earned. With real work.
That's the whole idea. Trust isn't promised in a contract. It's built, one project at a time.
One business day. Just a real number inside the range above.