We are not a dev shop. We have more than 50 incredible, senior developers, but our mission and model is completely different.
No rate cards. We don't make a profit from the margin. Sure, we have a little bit of a margin to keep ourselves going, but whereas dev shops and agencies try to pay developers as little as they can and charge you as much as they can, we pay developers exactly what they ask for and add a couple of dollars to it. That usually results in a margin of ~10-15% vs the industry average of 50-70%.
For example, we recently hired a developer from one of those "we only hire the top 1% of developers" places (which is nonsense, by the way). They were paying him $40/hour and his bill rate (to you) was $140/hour. At FastCTO, we pay him $60/hour and his bill rate is $68/hour. We consider that a win/win all around - the developer can support his family and the client pays less than half of what his "market rate" is. Pair that with the fact that this particular developer (like most of our developers) is Ukrainian, and it's a double win in our books! 🇺🇦
These days, you can build anything you want in any stack, but that does not mean they are all the same. Some things are better to build in one language than another. Some stacks are easier to hire for. Some stacks are faster for certain types of applications. That's why we're stack-agnostic - if you don't have anything yet, let us help you pick the right stack for what you need - we want you to make good decisions regardless of whether you use our developers or not. And if you already have something - great - we have senior developers in pretty much any stack!
Don't treat your software like a project. We are here to help you build your company. We want you to have the foundation for the next 7 years of your company - that's about how long software lives for before you need to rewrite it. Sure, your team will grow and shrink with your needs (and we're here to help), but a software company needs senior software developers - it shouldn't be someone's guinea pig project.
Who would we be if we said otherwise? But seriously, take a look below.
The FastCTO model works best with super senior developers so we only hire super senior developers. We pay them above market, but with our low margins, they still end up less expensive to our clients than a junior or mid level developer at the average dev shop.
We have an incredible dev culture because each one of our developers works with experienced CTOs and gets valuable experience from that every day. We span over 15 countries and about a third of our developers are female.
We also provide free, unlimited training to everyone on our team. In fact, the only reason anyone has ever left is to start their own startup - which we both love and support!
Almost all our developers are Ukrainian and are either currently in Ukraine or have fled because of the war. We think that Ukraine is the best deal for amazing developers - before the war began and still. We think it's everyone's our responsibility to support Ukraine right now and we are doing everything we can to do just that.
Let's be honest - there are amazing developers all over the world. We don't have a monopoly on them and you shouldn't believe anyone who says they do. That's why we are happy to work with developers our clients bring to the table as well as add in our own, when needed.
FastCTO