Honest answers to the questions teams ask first.

Every engagement begins with a fixed-price discovery sprint (1–2 weeks). You walk away with a written plan covering architecture, scope, sequencing and a price ceiling, and you keep that plan whether or not we keep working together.

A senior practitioner leads every engagement and stays in the work day-to-day. We don’t pull a senior into the pitch and hand off to juniors after signing. The team you meet is the team that ships.

Most engagements run with 2–5 people: a lead, one or two engineers, often a designer, and a fractional architect when needed. We deliberately keep teams small.

A shared Slack/Teams channel, a written weekly update, a 30-minute live sync per week, and a dashboard that shows what shipped. No 60-slide steering committee decks.

We are distributed across North America, Europe and APAC, with at least four hours of overlap with every client. We schedule around your working day, not the other way around.

Yes — we routinely embed engineers and architects into client teams under team-augmentation agreements, including under NDAs and white-label arrangements when needed.

Discovery is always fixed-price. Build phases are typically T&M with a price ceiling, week-by-week burn-down visible to you. We use fixed-price builds when scope is genuinely well-known; we tell you when it isn’t.

Discovery sprints run $8k–$25k. Build phases typically run $50k–$500k over 3–9 months. Smaller targeted engagements are welcome too — we’d rather take a $30k project we can do well than a $300k one we can’t.

Yes. You own the source, the designs, the docs and the infrastructure we build. Our standard MSA assigns all IP to the client on payment.

Yes — our contracts allow you to terminate any week with two weeks’ notice. Hand-off documentation is part of every engagement so the next team (yours or someone else’s) can pick it up cleanly.

Yes. After a successful build, many clients move us onto a monthly retainer for ongoing improvements and operations. Retainers are sized to a clear weekly capacity so you know what you’re getting.

Yes — before discovery, before due diligence, before anything. We can use yours or ours.

In your cloud accounts. Where we operate platforms, we provision them in the client’s AWS / GCP / Azure org. We don’t move customer data into our own accounts unless you specifically ask us to.

Our internal practices are aligned with SOC 2 (SSO, MFA, least-privilege access, encrypted laptops, access reviews, audit logs). We can map our controls to your auditor’s questionnaire on request.

Engagements that touch PII or PHI run under a DPA and, where required, a BAA. We use environment-specific access controls, encryption at rest and in transit, and minimum-necessary access for engineers.

Where allowed by your policy, yes — we use enterprise tier AI coding tools that don’t train on your data. If you require us not to, we honour that and document it in writing.

Yes. Every product on this site is built and supported by AppColab full-time staff. There is no third-party reseller chain.

BarcodeToCloud Mobile cancels through the App Store / Play Store. Web subscriptions cancel from the in-app billing page. DearInvite events are pay-once — no recurring billing.

Yes — every product can be branded, extended or self-hosted under an enterprise agreement. Get in touch and we’ll scope it honestly.

For client implementations, yes — we fix bugs and issues identified within 30 days of go-live at no extra charge. For SaaS products, ongoing fixes are part of the subscription.

Most years, yes — selectively. We grow ~5–10 people per year. If our work resonates, send your portfolio to careers@appcolab.com.

No. AppColab is profitable and self-funded since founding in 2013. We don’t answer to investors who want us to scale beyond what we can deliver well.

New York is our administrative home, but the team is distributed by default. We meet up in person twice a year and visit clients on request.

A fraction of every engagement goes to a non-profit chosen by the engineering team each quarter, and senior staff take on at-cost or pro-bono engagements with mission-aligned organizations.