Every question, answered straight
Working with a development studio shouldn't require decoding one. Here's everything clients ask before starting — in plain English, with real numbers.
Working with us
What an engagement feels like from your side of the table — involvement, location, and how fast things move.
Most of our clients aren't tech companies — they're restaurants, clinics, freight carriers, retailers. We translate everything into business terms, demo working software weekly, and never hide behind jargon. If something we say doesn't make sense, that's our failure, not yours.
About two hours a week: a Friday demo where you react to working software, plus async questions in a shared channel. Your input steers the product; the building is our job.
714software is based in Orange County, California, and works US hours. Nothing is subcontracted overseas. The person you meet on the first call is the person writing your code.
We integrate. Sometimes we're the senior builder who ships the big thing while your team keeps the lights on; sometimes we set architecture and standards your team carries forward. We leave codebases and habits your engineers keep.
Strategy calls happen within a couple of days. Discovery typically starts within two weeks of signing, and you'll see the first working software two to three weeks after that.
Pricing & contracts
You don't pay until it's finished, services from $35/month, no lock-in — the fine print, minus the fine print.
No catch — a different model. Traditional agencies charge you the whole build up front, so you carry all the risk. We build at our own risk and earn it back over the life of your subscription. We only win if your software keeps working for you month after month, which is exactly the incentive you want your developer to have.
Exactly what it says. Scoping is free. The build is free — no deposits, no milestone invoices, no hourly meters. Your first payment happens the day your finished product is delivered, running, and in your hands. If we never finish, you never pay.
You do, in writing, before we start. Free scoping produces a plain-English product plan — the workflows, screens, and integrations in scope. 'Finished' means that plan is delivered and working. You sign off against the document, not against our opinion.
From $35 a month your product stays hosted, monitored, backed up, security-patched, and supported — with bug fixes covered. Products that need ongoing new features move to a Scale subscription with dedicated build time. Every subscription is priced in writing before it starts, and $35/month is where they begin.
Subscriptions are month to month — cancel whenever you like. Your business data is always yours, and we'll export it for you on the way out. The software itself — the code we build, host, and keep running — stays with 714software; that's the trade that lets you start for $0 and pay just $35 a month instead of a big upfront bill.
Book a free strategy call. We'll ask about your business, not your tech — where hours are being lost, where customers drop off, what a win looks like. You'll leave with an honest read on whether custom software is even the right answer. Sometimes it isn't, and we'll say so.
Service-specific questions
The quick answers live here; the deep ones live on each service page — one click away.
Both. Roughly a third of our engagements start with a codebase another team wrote. We begin with a two-week technical audit, stabilize the highest-risk areas, then move to a normal delivery cadence.
714software does — we build it, host it, and keep it running, which is exactly why you pay nothing up front and just $35 a month after. Your business data is always yours and exportable on request. You get software running your business without owning a codebase or hiring a developer to maintain it.
Yes, and it usually goes great. We slot in as the senior product engineer — pairing, reviewing, and setting up standards your team keeps after we roll off.
We score the app against a short rubric: media/hardware intensity, offline needs, animation complexity, and team plans after launch. Most business apps land on React Native; camera-heavy, AR, or wearable-first products go native. We show you the scoring, not just the verdict.
Yes. We prepare the review notes, demo accounts, and privacy disclosures, and we respond to reviewer questions directly until the app is live.
Every mobile build includes 30 days of post-launch support. Most clients then move to a Care or Scale retainer for iteration, OS-version updates, and store maintenance.
Data never leaves your cloud without an explicit agreement. We use zero-retention API tiers, redact PII before inference where required, and can deploy fully inside your VPC for regulated workloads.
Three layers: retrieval grounding so answers cite your actual documents, evaluation suites that score accuracy on every change, and confidence thresholds that route uncertain cases to a human.
Most failed chatbots were prompts pointed at a website. We build systems: grounded retrieval, real integrations that let the AI actually do things, and measurement. The difference shows up in resolution rates within weeks.
It depends on catalog complexity and margin structure. Standard retail usually wins on headless Shopify; heavy customization, B2B pricing, or unusual fulfillment logic often justify a custom cart. We model total cost over three years before recommending.
Yes — migrations ship with a full URL map, 301 strategy, structured data, and pre/post-launch crawl comparisons. Protecting organic traffic is a launch gate, not an afterthought.
We are from Orange County's restaurant scene — direct online ordering that cuts out third-party commissions is one of our favorite builds. Menu management, kitchen tickets, and loyalty included.
This is one of our most common engagements. A two-week audit maps every dollar to a workload, then we execute the savings plan — rightsizing, storage tiering, commitment discounts, and killing zombie resources. Typical result is 30–60% reduction.
Yes — our Care and Scale retainers include infrastructure monitoring, patching, cost review, and incident response with defined response times.
We implement the technical controls — access management, logging, encryption, change management — and work alongside your auditor or compliance platform (Vanta, Drata) to get you through the audit.
Often, yes. Many 'redesigns' are really re-skins plus a handful of flow fixes. We audit first, then propose the smallest design change that produces the biggest usability gain — sometimes that is a design system retrofit rather than a rebuild.
Cleanly. Handoff includes annotated Figma files, a token spec, interaction notes, and a walkthrough call. When we also build, this step disappears entirely — the designers and engineers are one team.
No — this is exactly the situation strangler migrations exist for. We reverse-engineer behavior from the running system and its data, document the business rules as we go, and validate the new system against real historical transactions.
That is the entire design constraint. Old and new run side by side; each workflow cuts over only after parallel results reconcile. Your team never faces a hard switch date for the whole business at once.
Yes, within the quarter. Quiet months bank hours for busy ones; we true up at quarter end so you never pay for time you did not use.
Yes. We start with a paid onboarding audit (one to two weeks) to learn the codebase, add monitoring, and fix the scariest issues. After that it is covered like any of our own builds.
Retainer clients get priority overflow at a discounted hourly rate, or we scope the extra work as a mini-project. Either way you approve the cost before we start.
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Every business is different, and the honest answer to most questions is “let’s look at yours.” Ask directly — a person replies, usually within one business day.