Co-Development Cost Estimator

At our standard rate of £600 per developer per day ex VAT, one full-time engineer works out at roughly £13,000 per month and a pair at around £26,000 per month, based on 4.33 working weeks in an average month. Part-time engagements scale down proportionally: a single engineer at two days a week is closer to £5,200 per month.

Linearly. Every engineer on the engagement bills at the same £600 per day ex VAT, so a two-developer engagement is £1,200 per day and a four-developer engagement is £2,400 per day. There is no volume pricing and no junior pass-through: the rate is the same because the seniority is the same.

A billable day is 7 hours of focused engineering time. Stand-ups, sprint reviews, and code review within your team are included in that. We bill in half-day increments at the smallest, so a retainer of two days a week is billed as two days regardless of how the hours fall across the week.

Co-development means we take ownership of a slice of the project and deliver it as a unit, with our own internal review and QA. Staff augmentation means individual engineers slot into your team, take tickets from your backlog, and report to your leads. The day rate is the same for both; the difference is where accountability sits. Co-development suits studios that want a feature or a platform delivered; staff augmentation suits studios with strong internal leadership that need capacity.

A LiveOps retainer reserves a fixed number of days per week for your live game, typically between 2 and 5, which is indicatively £5,000 to £13,000 per month ex VAT. Those days cover server monitoring, crash triage, content drops, platform compliance, and performance regressions. Retainers are billed monthly in advance and reviewed quarterly so the commitment level can track your update cadence.

UK VAT at 20% applies to UK-based clients. Clients outside the UK are generally invoiced without UK VAT under the reverse-charge rules for business-to-business services, though your own local tax obligations may still apply. Use the VAT toggle to see both figures, and speak to your accountant about your specific position.

One month for staff augmentation and LiveOps, and typically two to three months for co-development, because a co-development team needs time to build enough context to work independently. Shorter pieces of work are usually better handled as a fixed-scope audit or a discovery phase.

Yes. Most engagements start small, prove out the working relationship, and grow from there. We ask for four weeks' notice on a reduction so we can plan handover properly, and we can usually add capacity with two to three weeks of lead time depending on the skills required.

The arithmetic is exact: it applies our published day rates to the days you enter. What it cannot know is your project. Onboarding time, code quality, platform certification, and the amount of unplanned work in a live game all move the real figure. Treat the number as a budgeting starting point and talk to us for a scoped proposal.

The day rate covers the engineer, their tooling, and the project management overhead of running the engagement, including sprint planning, reporting, and a weekly playable build where relevant. It does not cover third-party licences, devkits, store fees, cloud infrastructure, or outsourced art and audio. Those are passed through at cost and agreed in advance.