Vicky Hariadi

The money question

What this costs

The landing page says there are no packages and no tiers. That’s true, and it is also what every agency site says immediately before asking you to book a call. So this page does the other thing: how the number gets worked out, and what it doesn’t include.

No form to fill in first.

Why there's no list

A rate card works when everyone is buying the same thing.

Nobody arrives with the same thing. One owner needs a plan and nothing built at all. One has a system falling over and needs somebody to catch it. One is already paying four developers and has nobody deciding what they should work on. A single number for all three would be wrong twice.

If I can't explain the number, I've guessed at it.

What I can give you here is the shape. How each kind of work is charged, what makes it move, and which of your costs are not paid to me at all.

The four shapes

How each kind of work gets charged

The four ways of working from the landing page, and what each one does to your costs.

Technology Advisory

Decisions and direction. No build.

How it's billed
Monthly, for a fixed slice of my week.

Best when you already have people who can build, and nobody whose job it is to decide what they build.

Ongoing Ownership

The technology side is mine to run.

How it's billed
One flat number a month. Quiet months and bad months cost the same.

For a business that already runs on something, where the only person responsible for it is currently you.

Product Development

Idea to working product.

How it's billed
A fee to build it, then a monthly one after that. The second is the one people forget to budget for, and it’s why so many systems get launched and then slowly stop working.

If there’s nothing yet. Or if what’s there was built over a weekend and has stopped coping with real use.

Leading Your Team

Planning, review and direction for the developers you already have.

How it's billed
Monthly, sized by how many people and how often.

You’re already paying engineers and can’t tell whether the money is going anywhere. Usually it is. They’re pointed at the wrong things.

What moves it

Four things decide the number

Roughly in order of how much they matter.

How much of me
The big one. A day a week and a day a month are different jobs, and most of the gap between any two quotes is this and nothing else.
Whether something already exists
Taking over what someone else built costs more for the first month or so, because that month goes on reading. After that it’s cheaper than starting clean, since the hardest part — people already using it — is behind you.
How fast
A deadline that genuinely can’t move gets priced like one. If yours can move, say so early. It’s usually worth more than anything else on this list.
Who else is involved
Being the only engineer and leading four of them are different jobs. Neither is automatically dearer.

Before you ask

What's in the number, and what isn't

In it

  • The technical decisions, and being answerable for them afterwards.
  • The build, or leading whoever is doing the building.
  • Keeping it running. Monitoring, backups, the Saturday it breaks.
  • New features as the business changes.
  • Being reachable in plain language, without a meeting being booked first.

Not in it, and not marked up

  • Servers, domains, anything with a monthly bill of its own.
  • Third-party services: payments, messaging, AI credits.
  • Licences and hardware.

Those go on your card, in your name, and they stay yours if we ever stop. I don’t resell them and I don’t take a cut. A technology bill you can’t see is a technology bill you can’t leave.

Being straight about it

When I'm the wrong call

Four situations where you’d do better somewhere else. Cheaper to find that out from a page than from an invoice.

You know what you want, you’ve written it down, and you want three quotes. That’s a project. A project shop will do it cheaper than I will, and they should.

You want the cheapest number. There is always a cheaper number.

You need someone in the office five days a week, on the payroll. That’s a hire. Make one — I’m happy to tell you what to look for.

You want technology handled and never mentioned again. Most of it, yes. But a few decisions a year are business decisions that happen to look technical, and those have to come back to you.

None of that is a judgement. I’d just rather you knew now than two months in.

The three money questions

Asked every single time

Do I own the code?
Yes. All of it, in your accounts, from the first commit. Not at handover, and not on final payment. If it needs writing down, it gets written down.
Can I stop?
Yes, with notice, and I’d spend that notice handing over properly. For a year I loaded every exam question into the school system myself, then built the teachers an editor that took that job off me. It’s on the work page, and it’s the same instinct.
What if you disappear?
Everything runs in your accounts and under your logins, not mine, and how it works gets written down as it’s built. If the only reason you needed me were that nobody else could get in, that would be a problem I’d created.

Your turn

Want the actual number?

Tell me roughly what you've got and where you'd like it to go.

You'll get a number and the reasoning behind it in the same conversation.

Ask what it'd cost

Goes to my WhatsApp. I reply myself.

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