We will explain how these agreements differ from one another and what projects they are suitable for.
Andrey Stepanov
CTO at ByteMinds
Fixed Price is an agreement where the volume and content of work on the project (technical specifications), implementation time and cost are fixed.
Features of Fixed Price
- Detailed technical specifications for development. Requirements for creating technical specifications must be thorough and exhaustive. Any changes to the technical specifications (such as adding new functionality or choosing a different technology) will have implications on deadlines and costs.
- Additional charges for anything beyond the agreed specifications. If, while working on a Fixed Price project, the client discovers they require additional features or changes, a new agreement with its own payment conditions is necessary.
- Higher cost per hour. The contractor guarantees that the project will be completed on time and without additional payments. Thus, the Fixed Price rates cover all potential risks, from both the customer's and the contractor's sides, as well as the involvement of project managers and other specialists.
Which projects is Fixed Price suitable for?
Fixed Price is ideal for projects with clear requirements, a limited budget, and specific deadlines, such as:
- Websites on a smaller scale - corporate, landing pages, one-page websites;
- Distinct segments of website work - the development of specific tools (for example, calculators), or targeted automation of business processes;
- MVPs (minimum viable product) - the first version of an IT product that has a minimum set of functions sufficient to meet user needs.
We use the Fixed Price model to include extra features in a product for an existing client, perform system audits, and carry out analytics before starting a project.
We understand that changes during the development process can be critical to the success of a project, and Fixed Price limits them. Thus, for individual development projects, we adopt the Wagile approach within this model. This allows us to keep within the Fixed Price boundaries while incorporating flexibility to achieve more effective outcomes.
Time & Materials is an agreement that sets the developer's rate per hour. The customer pays for the time spent solving their problem and for the materials that were used during the work.
Features of Time & Materials
- Flexibility. When working with a T&M contractor, the customer is free to modify or adjust the project's features and functions at any time without the need for additional contracts and agreements. It's important to remember that any new task represents the development team's time, for which payment will be required.
- Transparent process. Working according to T&M, developers always keep the client informed of the current state of the project: regular meetings with the customer, presentations and constant time logging in time trackers. On T&M projects, we conduct a demo for clients every couple of weeks and provide a monthly report detailing the completed work and the total hours spent on it.
Which projects is Time & Materials suitable for?
T&M is best suited for large projects that require flexibility and do not have detailed technical specifications and a list of functional requirements.
- Startups involving innovative services and tools;
- Highly loaded websites with a large and ever-expanding list of functional requirements;
- Development of tools for business optimization and logic - personal accounts, intranet portals.
Retainer is an agreement that specifies the project team, the time it will spend on work monthly, and the cost of it.
Retainer Features
- Stability. The same people work for the client, the same number of hours per month for a fixed amount. None of these parameters will change throughout the Retainer agreement.
- Flexibility. As in the case of T&M, the customer is free to change requirements, set tasks and add functionality. It is only important to remember that the team's time for implementation is limited by the contract.
- Unspent hours will expire. If the client pays for 30 hours a month, and the team completes the assigned tasks in 20, the difference will expire and will not be carried over to the next month.
Which projects Retainer is suitable for?
Retainer is suitable when the customer has a large-scale project that needs to be developed, but does not have its own IT department or it needs to be reinforced with external personnel, or hire a ready-made development team:
- Startups and companies with an idea, but without IT competence;
- Ongoing development for large services post-release;
- Projects requiring continuous support.
Product and custom development requires flexibility, so sometimes it is useful to move from one model to another.
Typically, we initiate complex projects with an analytics phase under Fixed Price. After the analysis, we assess the scope of design and development work and suggest the client switch to T&M.
T&M is good here because when developing complex IT products, it is impossible to accurately estimate labor costs. Changes in requirements will inevitably appear, no matter how well you think them through. The scope of work will expand. T&M allows a flexible approach to changes within the project, unlike Fixed Price.
The contractor, working under Fixed Price, is very careful about the scope of work for which he has signed up, and any changes must go through a lengthy process of approvals and discussions. This process wastes time and diverts focus from the most important aspect - achieving business results.
A lot depends on choosing the right agreement - the timing and cost of the project, and its relevance upon completion of the work. Therefore, before offering the customer to work under one of the agreements, we dive into their business processes, study and understand the task, and collect all the requirements. Only after this can you understand what is better - Fixed Price, T&M or Retainer.
It's easy to start working with us. Just fill the brief or call us.
Dmitry Bastron
This article is a cheat sheet to inspect what's going on with the imported data by Xperience by Kentico Migration Toolkit, resolve some CI/CD issues and on many other occasions!
Anna Bastron
Let's try to understand how the ADM module works, its limitations and tactics for optimising its performance.
Dmitry Bastron
The more mature Xperience by Kentico product becomes, the more often I hear "How can we migrate there?”
Andrey Stepanov
In this article, we will touch on where to start designing the architecture and how to make sure that you don’t have to redo it during the process.
Anton Vorotyncev
Today, we will talk about assessing algorithm complexity and clearly demonstrate how this complexity affects the performance of the code.
Tatiana Golovacheva
The development market today feels like a race - each lap is quicker, and one wrong move can cost you. In this race, excellent client service can either add extra points or lead to a loss dot to high competition.
Dmitry Bastron
Ensuring security during development is crucial, especially as online and e-commerce services become more complex. To mitigate risks, we train developers in web security basics and regularly perform third-party penetration testing before launch.
Anna Bastron
In my previous article, I shared a comprehensive troubleshooting guide for Sitecore XM Cloud tracking and personalisation. This article visualises what happens behind the scenes when you enable personalisation and tracking in your Sitecore XM Cloud applications.
Sergei Pestov
All the text and examples in this article refer to Next.js 13.4 and newer versions, in which React Server Components have gained stable status and became the recommended approach for developing applications using Next.js.
Anton Vorotyncev
Imagine you have a solution to a problem or a task, and now you need to evaluate the optimality of this solution from a performance perspective.
Artyom Chernenko
Let's talk about how to organize the interaction of microservices in a large, long-lived product, both synchronously and asynchronously.
Dmitry Berdnikov
We suggest using a special editor to immediately check each example while reading the article. This editor is convenient because you can switch the TypeScript version in it.
Anna Gevel
One of the first things I tested in Sitecore XM Cloud was embedded tracking and personalisation capabilities. It has been really interesting to see what is available out-of-the-box, how much flexibility XM Cloud offers to marketing teams and what is required from developers to set it up.
Dmitry Bastron
We will take you on a journey through a real-life scenario of implementing advanced tracking and analytics using Kentico Xperience 13 DXP.
Anastasia Medvedeva
Kentico stands as one of our principal development tools, we believe it would be fitting to address why we opt to work with Kentico and why we allocate substantial time to cultivating our experts in this DXP.
Anna Gevel
As a software development company, we at Byteminds truly believe that learning and sharing knowledge is one of the best ways of growing technical expertise.
Anastasia Medvedeva
Our expertise spans full-scale builds and support to upgrades and replatforming.
Sergei Pestov
How to stop declining of the performance indicators of your ecommerce website and perform optimising page load performance.
Dmitry Bastron
We would like to share our experience of integrating Sitecore 9.3 with the Azure AD B2C (Azure Active Directory Business to Consumer) user management system.
Dmitry Bastron
We'll dive into practical implementation in your Xperience by Kentico project. We'll guide you through setting up a custom activity type and show you how to log visitor activities effectively.
Egor Yaroslavcev
Chrome DevTools serves as a developer console, offering an array of in-browser tools for constructing and debugging websites and applications.
Anastasia Medvedeva
Since 2015, we've been harnessing Kentico's capabilities well beyond its core CMS functions.
Anastasia Medvedeva
Our team boasts several developers experienced in working with Umbraco, specialising in development, upgrading, and replatforming from other CMS to Umbraco.
Anna Gevel
We've collected various findings around decision models and programmable nodes working with Sitecore Personalize.
Fedor Kiselev
Let's talk about what enterprise development is, what nuance enterprise projects may have, and which skills you need to acquire to successfully work within the .NET stack.
Andrey Stepanov
All you need to know about Headless CMS. We also share the knowledge about benefits of Headless CMS, its pros and cons.
We'll consider the top-to-bottom approach for modeling content relationships, as it is more user-friendly for content editors working in the Kontent.ai admin interface.