Money

How do you price engagements?

By scope, never by the hour. Every engagement is a fixed-fee contract for a defined outcome — you know what you're paying before we start. The number depends on the depth of the solution, the systems involved, and what 'done' actually means for the work. We quote precisely after the first call, once we understand the shape.

Do you do time-and-materials?

No. T&M engagements punish the client for the consultant’s pace, which is the wrong incentive. Fixed-fee, fixed-scope. If we discover something mid-engagement that materially changes the work, we agree on a change order in writing, not on a meter.

Are travel and expenses included?

Most engagements are fully remote. When on-site weeks are part of the scope (typical for Strategy sprints and Embed retainers), travel is billed at cost with no markup.

How does payment work?

Half upfront, half on completion for sprints and pilots. Build engagements are typically billed in three milestones. Embed retainers are billed monthly in advance. Net-15 invoicing through standard ACH or wire — no payment-processor markups.

Practice

Who actually does the work?

I do. HB Services is intentionally a principal-led practice — the person you meet on the first call is the person doing the engagement. For very large Build engagements I occasionally bring in a trusted collaborator, always with your sign-off and always named.

Do you subcontract?

Rarely, and only with explicit consent. When I do, it's to one of a small number of senior engineers I've worked with for years — not an offshored team, not a faceless agency. You're told upfront if anyone else is touching your code.

What stacks do you work in?

TypeScript, Python, Go, and Rust on the engineering side. Postgres, Cloudflare Workers, AWS, GCP on the infra side. I work on your stack — I don't show up with a framework preference. The exception is AI tooling, where I do have opinions about which evaluators, vector stores, and orchestrators are worth their salt.

What model providers do you use?

Whichever fits the work — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, plus open-source models on self-hosted infrastructure when latency or cost demands it. I have no exclusive partnerships with any vendor, which means I can recommend honestly.

Outcomes

What happens if the engagement doesn't ship?

We agree on what 'ship' means before the engagement starts. If a deliverable hasn't met that bar by the agreed date, we keep working — at my expense — until it does, or we end the engagement and refund the unmet portion. I've never had to do the second one, but it's the standard.

What does 'good' look like at the end?

Three things, in priority order: (1) the deliverable is in production and working, (2) your team can extend and operate it without me, (3) somebody on your team is meaningfully sharper at this kind of problem than they were at the start. If the third doesn't happen, the engagement was probably scoped too narrowly.

What does the handoff look like?

Documentation written for the team that's taking it over — not autogenerated reference docs. A working session with whoever will own the code or process. Standing access to me for thirty days after engagement end for questions, at no charge.

Trust

Who owns the IP?

You do. All work product, code, prompts, evals, and documentation are assigned to you on payment. I retain the right to discuss the engagement at a high level (with your consent) and to reuse general patterns and learnings in future work — never specific code or proprietary information.

How is my data handled?

With care. Data stays in your environment whenever possible — I prefer to work against your systems rather than copy data out. When data has to leave, it’s encrypted in transit and at rest, and we agree in writing on what gets deleted at engagement end. See the security page for the longer version.

Will you sign our DPA?

Yes. Standard DPAs are fine; we’ll redline anything unusual. We have a template DPA if you don’t have one.

Do you have references?

Yes — happy to share named references after the second conversation, with their permission. I don’t list them publicly out of respect for their privacy. If you want a sense of the work first, the insights page is the most direct read on how I think.