WAVECT vs DEV AGENCIES
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.
Book a thirty-minute call“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.”
Six dimensions where the work actually diverges.
Weekly outcome fee. One number per week.
PRICING UNITHourly billing or monthly retainer. Hours-tracked is the norm.
Senior only. No juniors on your retainer.
SENIORITY ON THE WORKMixed 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 TOProject manager plus a rotating bench.
We push back on scope. If a feature should not ship, we say so.
SCOPE OWNERSHIPYou own the scope. They execute what you signed for.
Cancel any week. Werkvertrag on fixed-price work.
EXIT TERMSNotice period or contract minimum. Termination clauses vary.
Refund the last week if it did not blow you away.
WHAT IF IT FAILSDepends on the contract. Usually hours billed are hours owed.
The overlap is real, so be honest about where you sit. A generalist agency and Wavect both ship MVPs, full builds, and retainers. The divergence is structural, not cosmetic.
An agency’s margin comes from junior-on-senior leverage: a senior scopes the work, juniors execute it, a project manager sits between you and the people writing code. That model is efficient when the spec is already correct and you need throughput across parallel workstreams. If you have a CTO or a clear product owner who has already decided what to build, a twenty-person bench will beat us on raw capacity and price.
Where it breaks is when the spec itself is the risk. We bill a weekly outcome instead of tracked hours, put a founder and the senior engineer doing the work on every call, and we tell you when a feature should not ship. That pushback has no line item, but it is the point. The most expensive thing an agency builds is the feature you should have killed.
If your product judgment is solved, take the agency. If “should we even build this?” is still open, that is our work. See how we run build engagements.
If the bullets on the right describe your situation, hire the agency. If the bullets on the left describe it, talk to us.