Blog · 88 posts
Custom software costs $50-250/hr depending on location and seniority. A typical product costs $150K-500K/year. Here are real numbers from real projects.
Dennis Vorobyov 7 min read The advisory-only fractional CTO is expensive theater. The only kind worth paying for comes welded to people who ship. Here's how startups buy the wrong one.
Dennis Vorobyov 8 min read The 'scale up, scale down, swap bodies' pitch is the defect in team augmentation, not the feature. The number that predicts success is turnover.
Dennis Vorobyov 6 min read Custom enterprise software services are sold on size, stack, and methodology. The one variable that predicts the outcome is team continuity. Here's why.
Kseniia Cherepakhina 7 min read Most mobile app development services sell you a launch and disappear. The build is the cheap part. Continuity, not the deliverable, is what's worth paying for.
Kseniia Cherepakhina 5 min read Most custom business software shouldn't exist. Build only your differentiator, buy the commodity, and treat scope, not code, as the thing that kills projects.
Illia Hrybovskyi 7 min read IT staff augmentation is sold as flexible skill on demand. What it actually meters is ramp time and turnover. The fix isn't more augmentation.
Illia Hrybovskyi 8 min read The search for the "best Android app development company" is a category error. Retention, native judgment, and code review predict a good app, not rankings.
Illia Hrybovskyi 8 min read The tidy phased SaaS development process is a fiction. Scope discipline and team continuity are what actually ship product.
Kseniia Cherepakhina 6 min read An MVP project is a small production system, not a disposable prototype. "Ship cheap and throw it away" quietly costs more than it saves.
Kseniia Cherepakhina 7 min read The weekend SaaS MVP is a trap: "minimum" ate "viable," and the throwaway you validate with becomes the codebase you can't kill.
Dennis Vorobyov 7 min read After 11 years on the vendor side, here's what separates good partnerships from bad ones. A framework for evaluating dev shops.
Dennis Vorobyov 9 min read A hard-truth take on outsource development: the cheap-rate arbitrage pitch is the part that fails, and continuity — not hourly rate — decides whether it works.
Kseniia Cherepakhina 6 min read DevOps consulting that hands you a pipeline and leaves rebuilds the silo the movement killed. The only engagement worth buying makes itself unnecessary.
Dennis Vorobyov 7 min read Most "custom web development services" sell you a launch when the real cost and risk live in the years after — here's what to actually judge a vendor on.
Illia Hrybovskyi 6 min read Ranking countries to outsource software development is a category error. The real predictor of outcome is seniority and retention, not the flag.
Dennis Vorobyov 6 min read Most CMS development services profit from the confusion between content and application. Here's what buying them well actually looks like.
Illia Hrybovskyi 7 min read An opinion piece arguing that the "hire dedicated iOS developers" pitch sells the wrong unit of work — and what to buy instead.
Dennis Vorobyov 7 min read An MVP in software is a scope decision, not a quality level — and confusing the two is why most "minimum viable products" are neither viable nor a product.
Dennis Vorobyov 6 min read A hard-truth take on the staff augmentation model: flexibility is the wrong reason to buy it, and continuity is the thing that actually pays off.
Kseniia Cherepakhina 6 min read Fractional CTO rates run $200–$400/hr or $5k–$25k a month. The hourly number is the least useful figure in the deal. Here's what you're paying for.
Illia Hrybovskyi 6 min read Most AI automation agencies sell fragile no-code demos. The only automation that survives production is owned, engineered software.
Illia Hrybovskyi 8 min read Staff augmentation means you rent the hands and keep the accountability. The only version worth buying is the one where the hands don't rotate.
Kseniia Cherepakhina 6 min read Nearshore means your engineering team is 1-3 time zones away. Portugal, Poland, and Latin America lead the market. Here's what to look for.
Dennis Vorobyov 10 min read