Questions buyers ask before they write to us.

Write to us through the contact page and say what you need built or fixed. We reply within 2 working days with questions or a suggested first call. If the work fits, we propose a 1-week discovery and you decide whether to go ahead.

A written specification that you own. It states what the system does, what it does not do, the data it holds, who can do what and the acceptance tests it must pass. We write it in 1 week, after reading your documentation and interviewing the people who run the current process. You can take it to another supplier.

It works because the project runs in writing first and on calls second. Stack9 is on UTC+5:30, so our working day overlaps the morning in Europe and the afternoon in Australia and East Asia. You get a written progress note every week to read in your own morning, and we schedule calls in the overlap.

Yes, once we have read it. Discovery then covers the existing code, data and documentation, and the specification says what stays, what must be fixed and what we would replace. We quote only after that. You need access to the source code and the hosting accounts, or a way to get them.

We do not build without a signed specification or quote before discovery. We do not place developers inside your team on a day rate. We do not hold your code or accounts to keep you as a client. If we cannot finish a piece of work properly, we say no at the start.

You do. You own the code, the data and the accounts, and we hold nothing back at handover. Any open-source components keep their own licences.

In an account you own, on the code hosting service you choose. We work in it as invited collaborators from day one. If you do not have an account yet, we help you open one in your company's name before we write any code.

You do. Hosting, domains and third-party services are registered in your name, and we work through the access you grant. At handover you receive every credential, and you can remove our access whenever you choose.

You can leave, and you keep everything built so far. The specification is yours, the code is already in your repository and each staging release is working software. The contract sets out what is payable for work done up to that date. Another team can pick the system up from what is in the repository.

We touch as little of it as we can. We build and test with anonymised or synthetic data where possible, and ask for real records only when a task needs them. Access runs through your accounts, so you can see it and revoke it. We agree the handling rules in writing before the build starts.