Project calculator
This calculator shows the kind of project a small team can build for a given number of engineering days, and roughly how long that takes in calendar time. Pick a project shape, set the size and choose a pace.
How an engineering day works
One engineering day costs £1,200 and is 8 hours of engineering time, delivered as four 2-hour sessions. At the steady pace of one session a week, one engineering day takes four weeks of calendar time. Spacing the sessions out gives you time to review progress and send feedback before the next one.
Each of our engineers works two 2-hour sessions a day on client work. Two hours is long enough to work through a difficult problem, and the time between sessions is used for reading, planning and breaks. In our experience, code written this way has fewer defects than code written over long working days with frequent interruptions.
The estimates below are calculated on this basis. A project of a few engineering days usually takes several weeks of calendar time, and we review progress with you regularly during that time.
Choose a project shape
1 session per week (steady pace, 2 hours / week)
Example projects at this scale
A focused, single-purpose tool for one team or service.
How to read this
The calculator gives an estimate of what can be built for a given number of engineering days. It is intended to help you avoid commissioning a project that is too small to be useful or too large to finish. Each tab is a different type of project, with its own range of engineering days and team size.
The second slider sets the number of sessions per week on the simple systems tab, and the number of engineers working in parallel on the other two tabs. More engineers shorten the calendar time for the same effort and cost. However, the engineers then spend more of their time coordinating with each other, and you have less time to review the work between sessions. The simple systems tab starts at one session a week, and the other two tabs start at a middle setting. In our experience, most clients get a better result from a smaller team, because there is more time to review the work as it progresses.
Each project is scoped before a price is agreed. The calculator gives a rough idea of how effort relates to outcome, and the scoping conversation establishes the size of your project.
We do not take on work we do not expect to finish. If your project does not fit any of the three shapes, for example because it is larger than 50 engineering days, we will tell you. We can then help split it into pieces that do fit, or suggest other suppliers if none of it fits.