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Senior web & app development · 20 capabilities
oakstone.digital
Oakstone / FAQ

Good questions deserve useful answers.

Costs, timelines, ownership and support — the things ambitious teams ask before they bring us the hard thing.

How this page is organised

Grouped by the
decision, not the topic.

These are the questions that come up in almost every first conversation, answered at the length they deserve rather than trimmed to a reassuring sentence. Where the honest answer is "it depends", the answer says what it depends on.

If the thing you need to know is not here, send it. Questions that arrive twice end up on this page, which is why it keeps getting longer.

Fit and approach

Whether we are the right people for the problem in front of you, and what changes if we are.

Ambitious B2B teams with a meaningful offer, a hard problem and the appetite to make a clear move. Typically that is founders, marketing leaders and product owners at companies between roughly ten and five hundred people, plus other agencies who use us white-label.

No. We bring senior engineering and design capacity plus an outside perspective, then leave your team with systems, documentation and confidence they can own. Several engagements are explicitly structured so your team ends up running the work entirely.

Design, engineering and platform work share one brief and one accountable lead. There is no junior layer funded by your project and no account manager between you and the people doing the work.

Yes, and most clients do. A website, a single integration, an accessibility audit or a performance sprint are all reasonable starting points. Work expands when it has earned the right to.

Yes, and about a third of our engagements are structured that way. We take a workstream your team does not have capacity or specialist depth for, work in your repositories under your review standards, and hand it back documented. Pairing with your engineers on the way out is part of the plan rather than an add-on.

Cost and timelines

What engagements cost, how long they run, and why there is no price list on the pricing page.

Decision sprints start in the low five figures. Full builds are quoted per stage once the diagnostic is done, because quoting a rebuild before understanding the problem produces a number that is wrong in one direction or the other. Retainers are monthly with a defined allowance.

A focused build is six to ten weeks. A platform, product or replatform runs three to six months, staged into releases so something useful is live early. Diagnostics and sprints are two to six weeks.

You get that in writing, along with what we would do instead, and the engagement ends there. It happens in roughly one enquiry in six. The diagnostic fee is the price of finding out cheaply, which is considerably less than the price of finding out in month four of a build.

Working together

Time zones, reporting rhythm, how success is measured and what happens when people change.

Remote-first, with senior people in New York and London. We work with teams across the United States, United Kingdom, UAE, Canada and Australia, and we adjust our week rather than asking you to adjust yours.

Yes. Maintenance, monitoring, hosting management and quarterly technical reviews are available as a retainer with response times written into the agreement rather than implied.

We agree a small set of outcomes before work begins — pipeline, conversion, Core Web Vitals, hours saved, adoption — and we take the baseline first so the comparison is real rather than rhetorical.

Decisions live in your repository rather than in someone’s head, precisely so this is survivable. A second senior is briefed on every engagement, and handover is a documented event with an overlap period rather than a forwarded inbox.

Technology, ownership and security

What happens to your stack, your code, your data and your conformance obligations.

Usually. We start by understanding what is already useful in your stack. Recommending a rewrite is easy and frequently wrong; we would rather find the smallest change that unblocks the business.

You do, entirely. Code sits in your repositories, infrastructure in your accounts, domains in your name, third-party services registered to you. There is no lock-in mechanism in how we work.

Least privilege, multi-factor authentication everywhere, access granted per engagement and revoked at the end rather than left open. We complete security questionnaires, sign your DPA and can work inside your own device and network requirements where enterprise procurement demands it.

Properly, which means keyboard paths, focus management, screen-reader announcement and comprehensible errors — not just an automated scan that catches a third of real issues. We deliver a WCAG 2.2 AA audit grouped by component rather than by page, wire axe checks into CI, and publish an accessibility statement so conformance does not decay between audits.

Repository access with a readable history, architecture and decision records, environment and deployment documentation, a runbook for the things that break, test coverage on the paths that matter, and a recorded walkthrough per subsystem. The test we hold ourselves to is whether another competent team could take over without calling us.

Starting

The practical first move, and what lands in your inbox after you make it.

Send us the hard thing. You will get a reply with a point of view, an honest read on whether we are the right people, and a suggested first step — not a generic capabilities deck.

Still deciding

Pages that answer
the longer questions.

A better brief starts here

Ready to make the next move obvious?

Bring us the hard thing. We will bring a point of view, a senior team and a clear next step.

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