Four phases, in order. Nothing surprising after the scope is signed.
Each of the four phases has a fixed duration, a fixed scope and one written artefact attached to it. Builds are quoted as one-time engagements; the care plan after launch is a flat monthly fee. Everything is bespoke except the way we run the work itself, which is the same on every project.
Phase 01
Intro call
30 minutes
A scoping conversation, not a sales pitch. We listen to what you are trying to ship, share an honest opinion in the room, and together decide whether Folt Labs is the right studio for the job or whether your time is better spent elsewhere.
You
- Walk us through what you want to ship and why — website, online store, custom system, mobile application, AI integration.
- Share whatever you already have: content, a current site, brand assets, screenshots, even a paper sketch.
- Tell us honestly what you have already tried, what worked and what did not.
Us
- Ask enough of the right questions to understand the shape and the constraints of the work.
- Tell you on the call whether we are a fit, or recommend a studio or freelancer better suited to the brief.
- Send a short written summary and a ballpark price the same day, never later than the next morning.
Artefacts
- Written call summary in your inbox
- Clear yes, no or not-yet recommendation
Phase 02
Discovery and written scope
One calendar week · roughly 15–20 combined working hours
One week to walk through your content, your operation, your brand and the tooling you already pay for. At the end of it you receive a written scope, a fixed price and a launch date in your inbox, before any invoice goes out.
You
- Reserve about two hours of decision-maker time across the kickoff workshop and the review session.
- Share brand assets, existing analytics access, and any credentials we need to study the current state.
- Nominate one internal point of contact who can answer questions through the week.
Us
- Run a 90-minute kickoff workshop to pin down outcomes, audience, constraints and success criteria.
- Carry out a competitor review, a content audit and (where applicable) a technical audit of your existing site.
- Write the scope, the pricing and the milestone plan — fixed-fee, no open-ended retainer attached.
- Run a 60-minute review session to walk you through every line of the proposal.
Artefacts
- Written scope document with milestones, deliverables and the quoted price
- Content inventory and sitemap covering the full project surface
- Short recorded walkthrough you can share internally for stakeholder sign-off
Phase 03
Build
1 to 12 weeks · depending on scope
We design and build inside your repository, commit every day, and show working progress every week. The price is agreed before we start. One scheduled thirty-minute sync per week, with everything else asynchronous and written down so the conversation is searchable.
You
- Grant repository access with branch-protection rules we can honour from day one.
- Keep an internal reviewer available for one thirty-minute sync each week.
- Provide content and assets on the agreed schedule, or commission us to handle copy and photography.
Us
- Daily commits to a shared branch. No long-lived forks, no surprise merges at the end of the project.
- Design reviews, staging previews and content loaded as we go, so feedback is concrete and continuous.
- Automated tests, monitoring, scheduled backups and a deploy pipeline are included in the build, not added later.
- Security review, performance budgets and accessibility audit completed before the launch milestone.
Artefacts
- Production-ready website, store or system merged to main
- Staging environment with every feature exercised before launch day
- Written deploy runbook, environment checklist and recorded administrator walkthrough
Phase 04
Launch and care
Launch day, then rolling monthly care
Launch day runs from a written checklist with a rollback plan ready. After launch the care plan starts: monthly written audit, dependency upgrades, security patches and a budget of improvement hours each month. Or we hand the codebase over cleanly and walk away. The choice is made after launch, not before.
You
- Pick the care tier that fits, or take a clean handover and run the system yourself.
- Flag anything unexpected in production through the shared channel; we monitor it but you see it daily.
- Tell us honestly where we over-delivered, where we missed and what should change next quarter.
Us
- Go-live checklist, DNS cutover and 72-hour post-launch monitoring with the original engineering owner on call.
- Monthly written audit covering performance, SEO, security, accessibility and link health.
- Dependency upgrades, backups verified by restore test, and a documented response-time SLA for urgent fixes.
- Quarterly roadmap review aligned to your budget, your priorities and the metrics that matter to you.
Artefacts
- Go-live checklist and live monitoring dashboards
- Monthly written care report, delivered the same week every month
- Open-ended invitation to come back later, at no obligation on either side
Constraints
Six things we will not negotiate.
Not because we are inflexible — because each of these is the conclusion of a lesson we have already paid for, or watched a peer pay for. We would rather state the position in advance than apologise for it during a project.
01
Scope before invoice
Open-ended scopes are how projects slip and how trust ends. We agree a written scope and a quoted price before we send the first invoice. Changes become a short, signed addendum or roll into the following care cycle, never an open tab.
02
Fixed fee for builds, flat monthly for care
Hourly billing quietly rewards slow work. A quoted engagement aligns our incentives with yours: ship the work properly, ship it on time, and move on to the next project worth shipping.
03
No templates dressed up as bespoke
Every build is designed for your brand, your audience and your content. We do not buy a Themeforest theme and present the result as custom work. When a template is genuinely the right call, we say so and adjust the price accordingly.
04
You own the code, end to end
Everything we write is committed to your repository as we go. There is no proprietary middleware to license forever. The care plan is a service contract, never a lock-in mechanism.
05
Asynchronous by default
One scheduled thirty-minute sync each week. Everything else is written down so it is searchable later. That discipline is how a small studio serves its clients well, instead of spreading itself thin across calendars.
06
No launch-and-disappear engagements
Every build is offered a care plan and we recommend it. If you decline, you walk away with a documented, monitored, backed-up codebase any competent team can maintain — not a system that depends on us answering an email.
Ready for a thirty-minute call?
No NDA, no proposal up front, no sales script. If Folt Labs is the wrong studio for what you have in mind, we will say so on the call and recommend who is right for it.
