Frequently Asked Questions

£4,500 +VAT over three weeks. It's a fixed-fee technical assessment that answers what to build, how to build it, what it will cost and in what order - before you commit to a build. It takes about four hours of your own time across three or four sessions.

A Platform Discovery Report of 15–20 pages, an architecture diagram, a costed phased roadmap and a 60-minute recorded walkthrough. If you already have an application, a Code Health Scorecard as well. The deliverables also map to what Innovate UK and similar funders ask for.

Then we tell you. If Airtable and Zapier solve it for £500 a month, that's the recommendation - a normal outcome, not a failed sprint. The job is to protect the £25,000 you were about to spend, not to manufacture build work for ourselves.

Credited in full if you sign a build within 30 days. And the report is yours - written to be portable, so any competent development team can work from it. Most clients don't take it elsewhere, but the option is deliberate.

Month one is orientation - judge it at day 30 and you are judging onboarding, not the work. The decisions that pay for this get made in months two and three.

No. Cash only, and no dilution - one less line on your cap table to explain at your next raise.

The Discovery Sprint answers one question once - build, rebuild or buy - and ends with a document. This is the ongoing version: the decisions keep coming, and someone senior keeps working through them with you. If you have had one, month one starts from its report.

Only if you want us to. Any Rocking Tech build is quoted like anyone else's, and getting a competing quote is sensible - I would. If you would rather your adviser had no build interest at all, say so at the start.

Laravel, Node, Python, React and Vue, AWS, Azure and GCP, and AI and LLM-based systems - including platforms built with Lovable, Bolt, Cursor and the rest. Where the right answer is a stack we do not build in, that is still the recommendation.

Then it has worked. Recruiting your full-time CTO is quoted separately as a fixed fee, handover included.

Usually within two weeks, subject to capacity.

The investor or acquirer, or a corporate finance adviser or law firm on their behalf.

Read-only access to source repositories, infrastructure, the issue tracker, and interviews with the technical team. All under NDA. Analysis runs in an isolated environment and nothing is retained after delivery.

The review proceeds on what is available, and the report states what was and was not inspected.

PHP and Laravel, Node, Python, React and Vue, AWS, Azure and GCP, and AI and LLM-based systems, including platforms built with AI coding tools.

The Platform Discovery Sprint is for a business planning to build or rebuild a platform: it produces an architecture, a roadmap and a build, buy or don't-build recommendation. Technical due diligence is for an investor or acquirer assessing an existing platform before a transaction.

Usually within a week of the scoping call, subject to access.

Between £25,000 and £75,000 +VAT for most projects. Internal tools and operations platforms are usually £25–35K. Customer-facing products and MVPs sit at £35–50K. Complex SaaS platforms are £50–75K and up. Fixed price, quoted from your Discovery Sprint – we don't bill hourly. The £4,500 Sprint fee is credited against whichever band you land in.

Eight to sixteen weeks from kick-off to launch. Dashboards and internal tools land at the shorter end; platforms with several integrations and payment processing at the longer end. You get a specific timeline in the proposal, based on the agreed scope.

Wording, mostly. An MVP is the startup term - the simplest version of an idea that solves the real problem. A custom platform is the same thing for an established business: purpose-built software replacing spreadsheets, SaaS workarounds or a legacy system. We build both as production software you can launch, sell and scale. Not prototypes.

Yes. It's £4,500 +VAT over three weeks and it's how every build starts. It defines what to build, how, in what order and for how much – before anyone writes code. The fee is credited in full against the build if you sign within 30 days, so if you go ahead it costs you nothing. If we conclude you shouldn't build at all, you've saved £25,000 and you keep the report.

Bring it. Most specs we see are a feature list, not a technical scope – they don't cost anything, sequence anything, or say what happens under load. The Sprint stress-tests what you have rather than starting from scratch, and you get the same architecture, roadmap and fixed quote out the other end.

Yes, on full payment - all code, designs and documentation, delivered via a Git repository. We build in Laravel and Vue.js deliberately: large communities, easy to hire for. You're not locked into anything obscure, or into us.

Usually, yes. Vibe-coded apps fail for well-documented reasons, and we've seen the same three problems in every AI-generated codebase we've assessed - a limitation of the tools, not a reflection on you. We start by telling you what's there, what's at risk and what to do about it. If what you've built is a marketing site rather than a web application, that's our fixed-price website work instead, from £500.

Often, and it's the part that doesn't show. What we find repeatedly: authentication that can be bypassed, database rules that let one user read another's data, secrets committed into the repository, and no error handling, so failures happen silently. Everything looks fine in the browser.

Maybe not. A lot of vibe-coded apps have decent frontend work worth keeping - the problems are usually in the backend: authentication, database design, security and error handling. The Discovery Sprint works out exactly what's salvageable and what needs rebuilding. That's the whole point of assessing before you rebuild.

Yes. If the frontend is solid and the trouble is backend-only, we can rebuild the backend on Laravel and keep your React frontend through Inertia.js. You don't automatically lose everything.

The Platform Rescue Call is free. If it's worth going further, the Discovery Sprint is £4,500 +VAT over three weeks and tells you what's fixable. A rebuild, where one is needed, is 8–16 weeks - and we won't put a number on that until we've read the codebase. Anyone quoting a rebuild timeline before reading the code is guessing.

Automation Discovery is £1,500 +VAT over two weeks, and it comes off your build in full. Builds are £6,000 for a Workflow, £12,000 for an Assistant and £22,000 for an Engine, depending on what the automation has to do. Discovery fixes which one you need, and the price, before you commit to anything. All fixed price - we don't bill hourly.

Because a few hundred pounds buys a Zap with a prompt in it. What we build has an audit log of every automated action, human approval gates on anything sensitive, a model-agnostic layer so a price rise or an outage doesn't mean a rebuild, and a governance note written for UK GDPR. That's the difference between something that demos well and something that survives a compliance conversation. If your workflow genuinely doesn't need any of that, a cheaper shop is the right call and we'll tell you so.

£40–150 a month for a Workflow, £80–300 for an Assistant and £150–500 for an Engine at realistic volumes. That covers orchestration, hosting and model API usage, paid by you directly to the providers rather than marked up through us. Model prices fell through 2026 rather than rising, so running these is rarely where the money goes.

Because one built properly beats five built halfway. We take the process costing you the most time, build that, and earn the next one. MIT's 2025 research found only around 5% of AI pilots reach measurable value - but the same study found projects delivered with an outside partner succeeded 67% of the time, against 33% for teams building it themselves. Starting narrow, with someone who has done it before, is how you stay out of the failed majority.

Zapier is fine for two or three simple steps. Past that it follows fixed rules, breaks on edge cases, loses data when something errors, and keeps no audit trail for compliance. Multi-step workflows also run £100–300 a month before you count the time someone spends nursing them. A professional build costs more up front and doesn't fail the same way - and if Zapier genuinely covers what you need, use Zapier.

Encrypted credentials, an audit log of every automated action, retention periods you control, UK GDPR throughout, and human approval gates on anything sensitive - the AI drafts, a person approves. Since May 2026 the ICO has been under a statutory duty to produce a code of practice on AI and automated decision-making (SI 2026/425). It isn't published yet — realistically 2027 — and it will set out good practice rather than new obligations; the binding law remains UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. We build to it now because it's where the regulator is heading. Models run through a model-agnostic layer, so if a better or cheaper one appears, or one has an outage, we swap it in configuration rather than rebuild.

Starter (£500 +VAT): up to 10 pages, bespoke design built from your brand materials, mobile-responsive, contact form, SEO basics and SSL - live in five working days. Business (£1,500 +VAT): up to 20 pages, full custom design, one business integration (booking, payments, email capture or CRM) and a comprehensive SEO setup - live in two weeks. Both are fixed price, and the clock starts when your questionnaire comes back rather than when you pay.

Bespoke. The clunky WordPress sites you've seen are generic themes with page builders bolted on - that's the look we avoid. We build a custom theme to your brief, so the design is yours and you still manage the content yourself. Wix and Squarespace are easy to use but they cap how bespoke you can go, and they're rented: leaving means rebuilding from scratch. A self-hosted WordPress site is entirely yours, code included, and you can host it anywhere.

Wix is free the way a gym membership is fitness. The £500 isn't for typing - it's bespoke design plus the layer you can't see: found on Google and in AI search, previews that work, leads that land in your inbox, GDPR done, and you knowing what's working. Three quarters of small businesses run no analytics at all.

Yes, bring it. Wix, Framer, Lovable, ChatGPT, plain HTML - send the files or a link. We keep what's good and it usually makes the build faster. Same bespoke design, same finished result; you've just given us a head start.

You own every customisation we build for you, and there's no lock-in to us. We deploy to a host of your choice, set up in your name - typically £5–30 a month, paid by you directly. We usually suggest DigitalOcean or Hetzner. Themes and plugins stay under their own licences, as on any WordPress site.

Three situations, mostly. You get visitors but not enough enquiries. Your site is two or more years old and nobody's checked it since launch - speed, mobile and SEO standards have moved on since. Or you're weighing a redesign and want an independent view on whether you need one before you spend. If none of those apply, you probably don't need us yet.

The Snapshot Audit (£95 +VAT) reviews your homepage and one or two key pages and gives you the five fixes worth doing first. Back within 48 hours. The Comprehensive Audit (£245 +VAT) is a full professional website review - every main page, technical deep-dive, SEO, content, UX and conversion - with a prioritised action roadmap. Back in five working days.

A free tool runs a scan and hands you a list. A professional website review adds what the scan can't do: verifying the findings, throwing out the false positives, and ranking what's left by what it's actually costing you. You get a decision, not raw data.

Yes. Plain English, and every technical issue explained as a business problem. The Comprehensive Audit includes scorecards and screenshots so you can see what we're talking about.

Yes - credited in full against any website package you go ahead with within 30 days of getting your report. So if you proceed, the diagnostic effectively costs nothing.

Usually the same shape every time: fine on the surface, silent failures underneath. Missing meta descriptions, no social preview tags so LinkedIn shares break, no analytics, no consent layer, nothing structured for AI search. None of it shows on your screen, which is exactly why it goes unfixed.

Three monthly tiers, each with a set hour allocation: Professional 6 hours, Business 10, Enterprise 20. Hours cover bug fixes, security patches, Laravel and PHP upgrades, performance work, monitoring, code review and the time we spend talking to you. New feature work beyond the allocation is scoped and quoted separately, as is anything above the Enterprise tier — higher allocations or a dedicated developer are a separate arrangement, not a bigger retainer.

Yes - most of our retainer clients have applications someone else wrote, or an AI tool did. We start with an onboarding review, usually two to four hours from your first month, to learn the codebase and document the risks. If it's in poor shape we'll say so and recommend a paid assessment before taking on a retainer.

Next business day on Professional, same day for urgent issues on Business, and four hours for critical issues on Enterprise — measured during UK business hours, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, excluding public holidays. Response means we have acknowledged the issue, not resolved it. Critical means the site is down or there's a security breach, not "I'd like this by Friday". We support Laravel 8 and above; older versions need an assessment first and usually an upgrade.

Three months, then rolling monthly with 30 days' notice. If you leave you get documentation, access notes and everything we've learnt about your application. No hostage situations - your code is yours.

Five things: problem validation, market understanding, solution clarity, resources and timing. Ten questions, each scored on its own. Takes about two minutes and shows you which areas are strong and which need work before you spend money on development.

Yes. No email, no login, no paywall - your scores appear on screen as soon as you finish. We keep anonymous session data to improve the tool and nothing else. Full detail is in our Privacy Policy.

Nothing, unless you want it to. You get a percentage, a tier, a breakdown across all five dimensions and next-step suggestions. Score well and the natural next step is a free call. Score low and the results tell you what to fix first.