/PLAYBOOK — 12 PRINCIPLES
HOW WE
ACTUALLY WORK.
The 12 principles behind every studio engagement and every Express Intent workshop. Same operator. Same playbook. Same opinions.
/01
FIXED PRICING, ALWAYS
Quoted after a free discovery call. No hourly billing. No scope-creep surcharges. The number you see is the number you pay. Same principle drives the Express Intent workshops: $47 means $47, not 'starting from'.
/02
WEEKLY WORKING DEMOS
You see real software running every 7 days, not slide decks or status reports. If something is off, you catch it in week 1, not week 8. Same cadence in the workshops and in client work.
/03
ONE OPERATOR, NO HANDOFFS
The person who teaches the workshop, writes the proposal, ships the code, and answers post-launch questions is the same person. No account managers, no offshore team, no telephone game.
/04
YOU OWN EVERYTHING
Code in your GitHub. Deploys to your accounts. Database in your Supabase. You can cut us out tomorrow and any developer can pick it up. Same posture in the workshops: you leave with the repo.
/05
WE'LL SAY NO
We turn down projects that don't fit. Scope too big for one operator, wrong shape for our stack, or a $79/mo SaaS would serve you better. About 25% of discovery calls end with us recommending you don't hire us. That's a feature.
/06
OPEN SOURCE FIRST
Default stack is open source you can fork: Next.js, Postgres, n8n, Mautic, Cal.com, Plausible. Closed source SaaS gets recommended only when the closed alternative materially beats the open one.
/07
EXAMPLE SCOPES, NOT CLIENT CLAIMS
We don't fake case studies. The studio is young. The work patterns we publish are drawn from real client and workshop builds, but we don't put fake LinkedIn headshots on them. Honest about being new beats fabricated credibility.
/08
BYOK FOR AI
Bring Your Own Key. You pay OpenAI / Anthropic / Twilio directly at published rates. We don't mark up AI costs. The /tools/byok-calculator shows the math.
/09
HONEST AT DISCOVERY
On the call, we'll tell you the truth: build, don't build, build different, hire someone else, use a SaaS, take the workshop. The 30 minutes is real, not a sales pitch wrapped in 'audit' language.
/10
DOCUMENTATION IS PART OF THE BUILD
Every shipped project includes a Loom walkthrough, a README, a runbook, and inline comments where they matter. Your next developer (or you) should be able to take over without our help.
/11
THE SAME OPERATOR TEACHES IT
Anything we ship at the studio can be taught at Express Intent. The two brands run on the same playbook. The /stack page maps every service to a workshop topic.
/12
BIASED TOWARD SHIPPING
Quality and craft matter — but shipping matters more. Software that exists at 80% beats software that's 100% in someone's head. Every engagement is structured around 'what ships this week.'
/THE PRINCIPLE BEHIND THE PRINCIPLES
Every one of these is a constraint we've put on ourselves to make the work more honest. They mean fewer clients, lower upsell pressure, harder discovery calls, and the occasional walking-away from money. That's the point.
/PUT THESE TO WORK
BOOK A 30-MIN CALL.
See how the playbook actually plays out. The discovery call is the cheapest way to see whether you want to work with the studio or self-teach via Express Intent.