WAVECT vs DEV AGENCIES

Wavect or a generalist dev agency. The work overlaps. The pricing model and the scope ownership do not.

We do dev-agency work too: MVPs, full project builds, weekly retainers. The actual differences are who shows up, how we get paid, and who decides what ships. If product judgment is already a solved problem on your side, a 20-person generalist agency is usually faster and cheaper. If it is not, our pricing and our pushback are where the value lives.

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“We hired a senior agency. They shipped exactly what we asked for. The product still failed. We never had the 'should we even build this?' conversation.”

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How they actually differ

Six dimensions where the work actually diverges.

WAVECT DIMENSION ALTERNATIVE

Weekly outcome fee. One number per week.

PRICING UNIT

Hourly billing or monthly retainer. Hours-tracked is the norm.

Senior only. No juniors on your retainer.

SENIORITY ON THE WORK

Mixed bench. Junior-on-senior leverage is at the heart of the agency margin model.

A founder plus the senior engineer doing the work.

WHO YOU ACTUALLY TALK TO

Project manager plus a rotating bench.

We push back on scope. If a feature should not ship, we say so.

SCOPE OWNERSHIP

You own the scope. They execute what you signed for.

Cancel any week. Werkvertrag on fixed-price work.

EXIT TERMS

Notice period or contract minimum. Termination clauses vary.

Refund the last week if it did not blow you away.

WHAT IF IT FAILS

Depends on the contract. Usually hours billed are hours owed.

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When each is the better call

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When Wavect is the better call

  • You are pre product-market fit and the product question is still open.
  • You want founder-grade pushback in the room, not a project manager taking notes.
  • You want one bill, one team, one accountability line. Not three vendors stitched together.
  • Your runway is the constraint. You cannot afford a six-month retainer to discover the product is wrong.
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When a generalist agency is the better call

  • You have a CTO in house and the scope is genuinely fixed.
  • You need parallel workstreams across many engineers at once. Capacity is the bottleneck, not direction.
  • You are past product-market fit and your roadmap is set. You need execution, not strategy.
  • Your budget supports a six to twelve month retainer and the cost of a wrong technical bet is recoverable.

If the bullets on the right describe your situation, hire the agency. If the bullets on the left describe it, talk to us.

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Relevant Wavect work

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FAQs

FAQs

Mechanically the work overlaps. We ship MVPs, full project builds, and weekly retainers, same shape as a dev agency. Three things actually differ. We staff senior only (no juniors on your retainer). We bill weekly outcomes (no hourly timesheets). We push back on scope (the unit of work is a shipped outcome, not a closed ticket). Lower throughput than a 20-person agency, higher accountability per shipped feature.
Yes. We run fixed-scope engagements starting at €3,500 (Discovery Phase) and weekly retainers from €400 to €20,000. The difference is what we deliver in those slots. We will not deliver tickets you ask for if we believe the tickets are wrong.
We do not bill per hour. We bill weekly outcomes. The total cost of shipping a real product through Wavect is usually lower than the total cost through an agency, because the agency keeps shipping wrong features at a lower hourly rate. Cheap hours that ship the wrong thing are expensive hours.
Four to twelve weeks per sprint, then re-evaluated. Some clients renew quarterly for years. Some leave after one sprint because the answer was clear. Both are fine.
No. Equity is a bet on the long tail. Our job is to derisk the next ninety days. Different time horizons. We have walked away from equity-only deals.
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