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I am a solo principal architect. The trade-off is real. The mitigations I offer for it are how I want you to choose.
I am the architect, the designer, the builder, and the person who answers the phone. There is no team to absorb load, no junior developer to delegate to, and no account manager between you and the work. That is the model. It is the deliberate choice. It is also the structural risk you should weigh before you sign anything.
What you trade away is a team that can keep moving if I am unavailable for a stretch. What you get back is the specific person who has built every screen and written every line of code in your project being the person who fixes the bug at nine on a Tuesday night, who answers the question the following morning, and who knows the codebase down to the file.
I do not market this as universally better. It is right for some projects and wrong for others. The page below names which.
Six concrete commitments that make the solo model safe to choose.
Every line of code lives in your repository, not mine, from the first commit. If anything happens to me, any senior Next.js developer can clone the repo, install dependencies, and continue the work the same afternoon.
Next.js, React, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Vercel. The same toolchain the largest product teams use. Hiring someone to maintain or extend the work after launch is the most replaceable thing about the engagement.
Calls go to my phone. Email goes to my inbox. There is no support tier, no triage queue, and no account manager translating your project to whoever is actually building it.
I use AI coding assistants the way other senior engineers do. They are part of how a one-person studio ships at the pace and quality the marketing implies. The architecture, the decisions, and the quality bar are all mine. The code is reviewed line by line before it ever ships.
Every engagement carries a current-state document, a decisions log, and an architecture map. The next developer to open the project, whether that is me a year later or someone else next month, can be productive in an hour.
For Enterprise engagements where the timeline materially matters, I offer a milestone-tied refund schedule. If I am unable to deliver a milestone, the funds tied to that milestone return to you. The contract names what triggers it and the schedule.
I would rather tell you on the first call than build half a project and hand it off. The disqualifying scenarios:
Bring these questions. If the answers do not sound like the answers below, I am not the right vendor.
On Starter and Professional tier engagements, the deposit is refunded on a milestone basis with the source code delivered up to the last completed milestone, so the project is portable to another developer. On Enterprise, a named successor developer is part of the engagement contract and is paid a small retainer to be available to take over if needed. The contract names the trigger and the schedule.
A revision is a change to the work product that does not change the scope agreed in the engagement letter. Two rounds are included on Starter and Professional. Scope billing is triggered when a change adds a new page, a new integration, a new feature surface, or alters the deliverable list named in the engagement letter. I quote the scope-billed work up front before doing it.
Yes. AI coding assistants are part of how a one-person studio ships at the pace and quality the marketing implies. The architecture, the design decisions, and the quality bar are all mine. The code is reviewed line by line before it ever ships, the same way a senior engineer at a product company reviews their own work.
Bug fixes, performance regressions, search-console errors, and any deliverable that does not match what the engagement letter names. Not included: new pages, new features, new integrations, or design changes you decided you want after launch. Those are billed against the maintenance retainer or as a Fix Sprint.
The retainer is month-to-month with no term lock. You can cancel any time. Coming back later is a per-incident charge at the hourly consulting rate of $175, or you re-subscribe to the retainer at the then-current rate.
Yes, in writing, in the contract, from the first commit. The repository sits in your GitHub or in mine until you have one, at which point ownership transfers. The database, the auth, the analytics, and any third-party integrations are all on accounts you control or that transfer to you at launch. There is no lock-in.