How we work: no calls, staged payments, safety gates, one guarantee

There is no phone number on this site, and that is a design decision, not an oversight. A call has to be scheduled; writing can be answered now. When you have decided your website needs to exist, you should not have to cool down until Thursday at 15:00. And everything that matters - your scope, your price, your guarantee - exists as text you can forward to a partner, a board or an accountant. Nothing depends on anyone's memory of a call.

Here is the whole sequence:

1. You write to us. Email or LinkedIn, whichever you already use.
2. We acknowledge your email instantly and answer within one business hour - no call, form or booking calendar. The reply contains our discovery questions, asked in one structured pass: your goals, your audience, the pages you need, existing content and assets, languages, how often you plan to update the site, integrations, signup or shop needs, your deadline, your budget range, and any visual references you like. One sitting, done. No drip-feed of questions over five days.
3. The offer arrives in writing: deliverables, explicit exclusions, acceptance criteria, your content responsibilities, the number of revision rounds, the timeline, the total price, the payment stages, the guarantee and the support boundary. Where your answers allow it, the offer follows in the same session; it never arrives later than the next business morning. It always arrives with a way to pay attached, so accepting is one action, not a negotiation.
4. A human reads and sends everything that reaches you. Our AI agents help us prepare answers, offers and drafts quickly; nothing goes out unread.

Either of the founders behind DevPowers can answer you, so a delivery day or a training day never delays the reply.

1. You write. One message, email or LinkedIn. Instant acknowledgement, a human reply within one business hour, discovery questions in one pass.
2. Scope and pay. You receive a fixed scope, a fixed quote and a payment path in writing. Work starts after the deposit and your content arrive.
3. Review the draft. Your first working draft arrives within 5 working days, on a preview URL. A fixed number of revision rounds is included and stated in your scope.
4. Take control. We launch, hand over the repository and pipeline, give you the playbook, and train you live.

One decision is made with you at the scope stage: what the site stands on. There are four foundations. A static site: every page published as a finished whole; simplest, fastest, least to break; right when your content changes a few times a year. A hybrid site: static pages plus one or two editable sections, such as a news list or an event agenda. A CMS-backed site: a full editing interface with multiple editors and a blog or newsroom; carries a small monthly hosting fee stated in the scope. A shop: a focused catalogue, cart and checkout - a separate package, not a marketplace. What drives the choice is how often your content changes, how many people edit it, and whether you need signups or sales. Not fashion, and not upselling. Whichever foundation we choose, the safety model below is identical.

Payment has three stages: deposit before work, payment on first-draft acceptance, and final payment on handover. You never pay for work that has not happened.

• Stage 1, the deposit. Paid before any delivery work begins. The amount is stated in your offer. The deposit is refundable under the guarantee below.
• The start condition. Delivery starts when the deposit is paid and we have received your content or a written content plan. This is also the moment the 5-working-day clock for the first draft starts. No other turnaround time is guaranteed.
• Stage 2. Due when you accept the first draft and it is deployed to a preview or production URL.
• Stage 3. Due when handover is complete: training delivered, repository and agent configuration done, CI/CD and your autonomy in place.

Two conditions apply to every project:

• Anything added to the agreed scope requires a written change order with its own price and timeline before work on it starts. A fixed number of revision rounds is included and stated in your scope; additional rounds are a written change order.
• If your content does not arrive by the deadline written in the agreement, delivery pauses, the deposit is retained, and restarting may require a new quote.

Handover is the point of the whole service: the site is finished, and the powers to continue are yours. When handover is complete, you have:

• Source code ownership. You own the code and can take it elsewhere at any time. No proprietary platform. No DevPowers licence fee. No lock-in.
• Repository access. You have access to the repository holding your site.
• The delivery pipeline. Protected branches plus automated end-to-end tests, quality and accessibility checks and AI code review - configured for your project, enforced without anyone at DevPowers.
• A configured AI agent on your side. Project-specific agent skills and MCP connectors teach your agent the project rules, the deployment process and the stop-and-warn conditions, so it starts out knowing your project. Choose ChatGPT with Codex, Claude, Copilot, Antigravity or another compatible tool. You pay that provider directly; we configure the one you choose.
• The written playbook. How to edit content, how to request AI-assisted changes, how deployment and rollback work, and the core-risk warning list.
• One live training session. Content editing, requesting changes from your AI agent, deploying and rolling back - covered live, with your own site in front of you.

The pipeline checks every result before it goes live. Every change to your site - ours before launch, yours after - passes through the same automated gates before it can reach your visitors:

• End-to-end tests. Software walks through your site like a visitor, opening pages, clicking links and forms, and comparing what it finds with what should be there.
• Quality checks. Code and content are checked against a long list of rules, from broken links and missing image descriptions to malformed markup.
• Accessibility checks. Contrast, keyboard navigation and image descriptions are verified automatically.
• AI code review. An AI reviewer reads every change and explains in plain language what it does before it can go live.

If any gate fails, the change cannot be merged. It cannot reach your live site. If all gates pass, the change is approved and published automatically. DevPowers does not review or approve routine releases. Rollback to the previous deployment is always available, and it is covered in your training session. What protects your site is the quality gates, not approval by DevPowers.

Larger work - new features, new integrations or a redesign - gets a separate quote and is bought as change credits or as a quoted project. Credits also cover repairs of damage you caused yourself, including damage after overriding a stop-and-warn.

The terms, literally:

• You buy a credit pack. Packs cost less as a short subscription than bought one-off.
• Each change consumes credits by its complexity, not by the time it takes. The scale is stated when you buy.
• Unused credits expire after two months.
• If something breaks because of our work, the repair is free and costs no credits.

These terms apply to every project, and the same words appear in your agreement:

• Hosting. DevPowers hosts client sites on its own standardised infrastructure. This is part of the product, not a per-client choice. Simple low-traffic sites include hosting for the first 12 months; CMS and shop projects carry a small monthly fee stated in the scope. Terms are renegotiated after 12 months.
• Domains and DNS. Domain ownership always stays with you. DNS is managed through the DevPowers standard provider.
• Code ownership. You own the source code and can take it elsewhere at any time. No proprietary platform, no licence fee.
• Repository access. You have access to the repository holding your site.
• Deployment. You can deploy to production yourself, including by prompting an AI agent. Protected branches plus automated end-to-end tests, quality and accessibility checks and AI code review are what gate a release. DevPowers does not review or approve routine changes.
• Infrastructure boundary. CI/CD configuration, hosting, DNS and secrets are managed by DevPowers and are not client-modifiable.
• Training. One live handover session, a written playbook and a configured agent skill are included in every build package.
• AI subscriptions. Not included. You use whatever AI tool you prefer and pay that provider directly. DevPowers configures whichever tool you choose.

An honest list, so nobody wastes a week finding out:

• Complex custom web applications: marketplaces, social networks, SaaS platforms, customer portals with heavy custom logic. If your project is really an application, we will say so.
• Large or complex e-commerce platforms: very large catalogues, ERP or warehouse integrations. We build simple shops; beyond that we will tell you plainly.
• Native mobile apps. We build websites.
• Writing your content from scratch, and photography. You bring your texts, images and brand assets, or we agree a written content plan.
• Brand identity design: logo and visual identity.
• Maintenance retainers for small changes. Small changes are yours to make, free and unlimited, after handover. That is the whole idea.
• Taking over the maintenance of sites built elsewhere.

If you are a solo expert and want the smallest sensible package, see the solo professional track. If your budget is far below what a properly engineered website costs, we will tell you honestly and point you to a do-it-yourself builder instead of taking your deposit.