Dedicated Development Team
A dedicated development team is a group of engineers who work only on your product, managed by you, billed monthly. ReliaBuilds provides dedicated teams to startups and SMBs in the US, UK, Australia and Canada, from a part-time maintenance retainer to full-time senior engineers, each quoted as a fixed monthly figure, with your hours covered and the code in your repository from day one.
What is a dedicated development team model?
The dedicated development team model is an engagement where an agency assigns named engineers to work exclusively on your product for a fixed monthly fee. You set priorities, review the work and own the output. The agency handles recruiting, payroll, equipment and replacement. It sits between hiring in-house (full control, slow and expensive) and project outsourcing (fast, but you hand over control).
At ReliaBuilds the team is built from our engineers across the UK, India and Bangladesh, and works the hours of your market. A dedicated team of developers can be one part-time engineer keeping a live product healthy or a full-time group shipping a roadmap. The terms are the same either way: fixed scope and quote before code, weekly demos on staging, and a repository you own.
Dedicated team vs staff augmentation vs project outsourcing: which fits a startup?
A dedicated team fits a startup that has a product to grow and no one to grow it; staff augmentation fits a company that already has an engineering lead and needs hands; project outsourcing fits a one-off build with a clear end. Most founders we talk to need the first one and have been quoted the third.
| Dedicated development team | Staff augmentation | Project outsourcing | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who manages the work | You (with our lead as point of contact) | Your in-house engineering manager | The vendor's project manager |
| Commitment | Monthly, scale up or down | Per seat, often 3-6 month minimums | Fixed contract with a delivery date |
| Best for | Ongoing product work, MVP to scale | Filling gaps in an existing team | A defined deliverable, then done |
| Knowledge retention | Stays with the same engineers | Leaves when the contractor leaves | Leaves at hand-off |
| Code ownership | Yours from day one | Yours | Usually yours, after final payment |
| Requires a technical lead on your side | No | Yes | No |
| Typical risk | Scope drift without a roadmap | Onboarding cost for each new seat | Change requests priced after the fact |
We also run fixed-price projects (see web development). The dedicated team is what clients move to once the product is live and the work never really ends.
How is a dedicated development team priced?
A dedicated team is priced as a monthly retainer sized to the hours you need, quoted as a fixed monthly figure after a discovery call. We don't publish a rate card. The figure depends on hours per month, seniority and whether you need design, QA or DevOps alongside the engineer, and it changes only when the team's shape does.
| Engagement | Hours per month | What it covers | Who you talk to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maintenance retainer | Part-time, a fixed block of hours | Bug fixes, dependency updates, monitoring, small changes, priority replies | A named engineer, replies within 24 hours |
| Part-time engineer | 40-80 | Feature work on a live product, one or two releases a month | A named engineer, plus our lead for planning |
| Full-time senior engineer | 160 | A named engineer on your roadmap, daily commits, weekly demos | The engineer daily; the lead for roadmap and reviews |
| Team of 2-4 (engineering + design/QA) | 320-640 combined | MVP build or scale-up, design and QA in the loop | Lead engineer as your single point of contact |
For context, rates for senior developers vary widely by region, and the gap between South Asia and the US is location, not seniority. That gap is what the fixed monthly figure reflects. See offshore development rates by country for the market picture and software development for startups for how this fits a seed-stage budget.
How do you manage a dedicated team in a different time zone?
You manage it the same way you'd manage an in-house team: a shared backlog, a daily written update, and a live overlap window every working day. Our Asia-based engineers (UTC+5:30 to UTC+6) overlap naturally with UK and Australian hours, and with the US on a shifted day. We schedule the team's hours around your market before the engagement starts.
| Your market | Your local overlap window | What happens in it |
|---|---|---|
| Australia (Sydney, AEST) | 1:00-5:00 pm | Stand-up, pairing, demo, decisions |
| United Kingdom (GMT/BST) | 8:00 am-1:00 pm | Stand-up, pairing, demo, decisions |
| US East (ET) | 7:00-11:00 am | Stand-up, review, blockers cleared |
| US West (PT) | 6:00-9:00 am | Stand-up, review, blockers cleared |
Outside the window the team works from the agreed backlog, and you wake up to a written update, pull requests and a staging build. Work lives in your GitHub, your Slack or Teams, and your project board. Weekly demos are scheduled in your working day, not ours.
Who owns the code and IP with a dedicated team?
You do. From the first commit, the repository is created under your GitHub organization, the cloud accounts are in your name and every engineer on the team signs over IP to you under the engagement contract. If you end the engagement tomorrow, nothing needs to be transferred, because nothing was ever ours.
- Repositories, domains, hosting and third-party accounts are opened under your ownership.
- NDA and IP assignment are part of the standard contract; we'll sign yours if you prefer.
- Documentation and environment setup live in the repo, so a new engineer, ours or yours, can onboard from it. No proprietary frameworks or licensed components lock you to us.
Browse our shipped projects to see the kind of codebases we hand over.
How fast can a dedicated development team start?
Faster than a hire. We reply to every inquiry within 24 hours with a project assessment, and a dedicated team can start as soon as the scope is signed: no recruiting cycle, no notice period, no relocation. Filling a senior engineering role in-house routinely takes months.
- Day 0: you send a one-paragraph brief through the contact form or email.
- Within 24 hours: we reply with questions, an assessment and a call slot.
- Discovery call: we agree the first month's roadmap, the team shape and the overlap window.
- Fixed quote: a written scope and a fixed monthly price. No hourly surprises.
- Kickoff: repository, environments and board set up under your accounts; first demo at the end of week one.
Questions
How is a dedicated team priced?
As a monthly retainer sized to the hours you need, quoted as a fixed monthly figure after a discovery call. The figure covers the engineers, the lead's time and the weekly demos, and it moves only when you change the team's shape. A maintenance tier keeps a live product healthy with a part-time block of hours; feature work on a roadmap is sized by hours per month; a full-time senior engineer or a team is quoted per seat. Hosting and third-party services are paid by you directly.
Should I start with a small test project?
We recommend it. Pick a real ticket that takes one to two weeks, pay a fixed price for it, and judge the code, the communication and the demo. If it holds up, convert to a monthly team with the same engineers. If it doesn't, you've lost two weeks and a small invoice, and you keep the code either way.
What are the hidden costs of a dedicated team?
There shouldn't be any, which is why we quote a fixed monthly figure. Our quote covers the engineers, the lead's time and demos. You pay hosting and third-party services directly.
Can I scale the team up or down?
Yes, month to month. Add a designer for a redesign, add a second engineer for a launch, drop back to the maintenance tier once things are stable. We ask for notice before a reduction so we can plan, but there is no long lock-in and no fee for changing the team's shape.
Can a dedicated team act as my CTO?
It can cover the technical decisions a CTO makes at seed stage: stack choice, architecture, security, hosting and later hiring plans. The lead engineer writes the technical plan during discovery and owns it after. What we don't do is fundraise or sit on your cap table. Many clients bring in an in-house CTO later and keep the team as the engineering bench.
Have a project in mind?
Tell us what you're building and how many hours a month you need. We reply within 24 hours with a team proposal and a fixed monthly quote.
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