One price. One date.
Stories you approved.
CQUELLE builds up to 8, 20 or 32 stories in 4, 8 or 12 weeks, at one price set after a 5-day scoping week, with a 30-day warranty on the accepted scope. The list you approved is the contract, not our hours.
Three fixed-price builds, one scoping week before each
Every build starts with the scoping week: 5 working days, two working sessions with your decision-maker, a list of stories with acceptance criteria, and one price for that list. Half of its fee is credited against any build started within 60 days.
Starter
4 weeks
up to 8 stories
One core workflow, from prototype or idea to a deployed, tested product.
Standard
8 weeks
up to 20 stories
A complete first release with several workflows and user roles, plus the integrations it needs.
Growth
12 weeks
up to 32 stories
A first release and a second milestone after it, with integrations and reporting.
Source code, data, infrastructure definitions and documentation are yours without restriction, whether or not you continue with us. The AI tooling we install beside your code stays CQUELLE's, yours to use for your product.
A system someone else built? A 5-day codebase assessment comes first, half of it credited against the follow-on work.
How the price stays fixed
Fixed-price software development only works if the scope is written in a unit both sides can count. Ours is the story: one thing your users can do, with acceptance criteria and a test scenario, capped at 24 hours of work in our public engineering handbook.
The fixed-price disputes we have seen came down to a sentence in a proposal that both sides read differently. A story with a written test scenario is read the same way by both sides.
The story list is the contract.
What is on the list is included. What is not on it is a new story.
New stories have a price, not a discussion.
Small, medium or large, priced in writing before work starts; you decide whether it goes into the build, into the monthly plan's hours, or into a later batch.
The date holds.
Adding a story moves the date by its size. Otherwise a story is swapped out to make room.
One decision-maker on your side.
A weekly demo, and acceptance within 5 business days of each delivery. If there is no response within 5 business days, the delivery counts as accepted; the contract says so, and the schedule cannot stall on either side.
Assumptions are written down with the price.
If one turns out wrong, the difference is a change request, in writing, agreed before the work happens.
Put a scope together
Pick a way in, a build size, where it runs and who keeps it running; the time to go-live updates as you go. The call starts from your selection, and the price for it comes after the scoping week.
Or skip this and bring what you have to the call.
Add stories beyond the build
Small, medium or large; each size is priced in the proposal before work starts.
| Small | 0 |
| Medium | 0 |
| Large | 0 |
Fixed price vs time and materials: what changes
A Starter build is a small team for four weeks, review, testing and deployment included, priced as one result. Time and materials is one developer by the month, paid for time rather than result; the difference shows the day something takes longer than planned.
- What you pay for
- Fixed price: Up to 8 stories, tested and deployed, by a date
- Time and materials: One person, full-time, by the month
- Who does the work
- Fixed price: Our engineers, using Claude Code under a written AI policy. Nothing ships without code review
- Time and materials: That person; review is yours to organize
- Overruns
- Fixed price: Ours
- Time and materials: Yours, at the monthly price
- Pipeline and hosting setup
- Fixed price: Included
- Time and materials: Scoped as extra work, inside the booked time
- After delivery
- Fixed price: Warranty on accepted scope
- Time and materials: None; the seat stays booked, or scales down with 30 days’ notice
- Best when
- Fixed price: No engineering lead on your side, and you need a finished product
- Time and materials: You already run engineering in-house and need capacity
What production means in these builds
A prototype that runs on one laptop is not a product. Every fixed-price build, Starter included, ships with these six things.
- Sign-in, user roles and a data model
- The database can change later without losing data; screens and server share one description of it.
- Automated tests and a deployment pipeline
- Tests at every layer, and a pipeline to a test environment and to production. Nothing reaches production unreviewed.
- Deployed on go-live day
- On our managed platform in Germany, ready for your first users, or in your own cloud account.
- GDPR-ready, privacy by design
- Personal data mapped and minimized, export and erasure for every data subject, a record of who consented to what and when, an audit trail per change.
- Data processing agreement
- Signed before go-live. Hosting is in Germany by default.
- Handover and warranty
- Documentation your own engineers could take over from.
Hosting and the operate plan
Your product runs on our managed platform in Frankfurt by default: Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, TLS, daily backups with 30-day retention, monitoring and platform updates, billed from go-live. Every operate plan adds alerting, security updates and a monthly allowance of hours, runs for 12 months, and is priced per tier in the proposal.
Hosting, billed monthly from go-live
- Hosting S
- Up to 100 active users, about 250,000 requests a month, shared database.
- Hosting M
- Up to 1,000 active users, about 2.5 million requests a month, dedicated database.
- Hosting L
- Up to 10,000 active users, about 25 million requests a month, dedicated compute and database.
Above Hosting L or outside Germany we quote individually. Your own AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or Hetzner account instead: 2 weeks of setup, paid to the provider.
Operate plans, what differs between the tiers
| Included | Essential | Standard | Regulated |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hours of changes and fixes a month | 10 | 40 | 80 |
| Response time | Next business day | 4 business hours | 4 business hours |
| A named engineer | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Monthly report on what shipped | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| A written record of each release, with evidence for your auditors | – | – | ✓ |
| Quarterly architecture and roadmap review | – | – | ✓ |
| Support during audits | – | – | ✓ |
The engineers who build it
CQUELLE GmbH, Hamburg, since 2019. A build is delivered by 2–5 engineers, among them the people here, with one named contact; the founder still reviews the work.
The project was done swiftly and at the right price; they didn't go over budget.
Eugen
Founder, still writes code
Hamburg, Germany
Roman
.NET & Angular Developer
Lviv, Ukraine
Oleh
.NET, Angular & React Developer
Warsaw, Poland
Mark
.NET & React Developer
Bucharest, Romania
Vladyslav
Full Stack Developer
Kharkiv, Ukraine
When a fixed price is the wrong fit
- Your roadmap changes weekly.
- A story list written in week one is wrong by week four. A dedicated team that re-plans weekly fits better. How a dedicated team works.
- You need more than 32 stories in the first release.
- Priced the same way, but no longer one build: scoping takes longer, and the contract covers more than one release.
- Nobody on your side can accept a delivery within 5 business days.
- Under the contract a delivery counts as accepted after 5 business days without a response. If nobody on your side can look at it in that time, you accept work unseen, and the fixed price stops protecting you.
- You want engineers inside your process, by the month, managed by you.
- That is a dedicated team, priced per role and month, in your own tools.
Questions before the scoping week
What does fixed-price software development cost at CQUELLE?
How can the price stay fixed when requirements change?
What happens after the build is delivered?
Where is the software hosted, and is it GDPR-compliant?
Do you use AI tools to build, and who owns the result?
Can I commission stories without a package?
Where the price comes from
Take the scope above into a 30-minute call; prototype or repository can come along under NDA. The scoping week produces the list; the proposal names the price. The call costs nothing.
Or send the prototype link through the form; you hear back within 48 hours.
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