Our designers in your sprints, by the month.

From $10,000 to $30,000 a month. Where you sit in that range is agreed before the first month, together with who is on the team. You pay for a team’s time over a month and never for hours on a timesheet. If you would like to try us first, a first piece of work is one week for $2,500.

We agree both before the team starts, along with the price. The arrangement runs by the month and is meant to change as your work does. Whatever the team makes is yours and sits in your accounts, so ending the arrangement does not leave the work stranded.

A subscription is a queue. You send requests and a designer works through them in order, which suits small, well-specified jobs in a style that already exists. An embedded team is in your planning and helps decide what the work should be, which suits product work where the problem is still being defined. Our article on studios, hires and subscriptions sets out the comparison.

A hire makes sense once design is needed every day on one product and someone on your side can manage a designer. An embedded team makes sense when you need more range than one person covers, or need it before a hire could start. The two also work in sequence: the team sets up the design system and your first designer inherits it.

Usually within a couple of weeks of the first call. Before the first month we agree what the team works on first, who is on it and how it joins your sprints. The first days go on getting into the product and learning how it behaves.

Mostly, yes. Design retainer, design team extension, dedicated designer and fractional designer are all names for designers from outside your company who work inside your team and are paid by the month. What differs from firm to firm is who you get and how much of their time. With us, both are agreed before the first month.

They work on your board, in your reviews and in your staging environment where you can give access. The studio is in Sydney and we work between Sydney and New York. The hours we overlap with your team each day are agreed before the first month, with the rest of the terms.

Yes, from our studio in Sydney. We joined Keeyu’s team when the company had raised a pre-seed round, began in its staging environment and met its product and engineering team in a working session each week. Our product design for Lumos, a seed-stage company at the time, ran as a retainer. Most companies we take on have raised a seed or Series A round.

Yes. An embedded team can be our designers and engineers together, or designers alone where your own engineers do the building. Keeyu was the second kind: we designed the product and built its design system in code, and Keeyu’s engineers built the product.

We need someone who sets priorities for the product and can make a decision in a review. We need a way into the product, preferably its staging environment, and a place on your board. We also need time each week with the engineers who build what we design.