Five things, done properly

A focused marketing or consultation site is typically two to four weeks of work. A full web application with authentication, a database and an admin surface is usually six to twelve weeks. A first mobile release is eight to fourteen weeks. Exact pricing comes after discovery, because quoting before understanding the scope produces a number that is wrong in one direction or the other.

Fixed-scope projects are fixed-price, quoted after discovery against a scope you have signed off. Ongoing work runs as a monthly retainer with a reserved number of days. Joining an existing team runs on a day rate. Hourly billing on an undefined scope serves neither of us.

It gets quoted as a change, in writing, before it is built. What does not happen is silent absorption — which ends in a rushed delivery — or silent omission, which ends in a launch missing something you assumed was included.

Yes, as a monthly retainer covering dependency and security patching, platform compatibility work, monitoring and a budgeted allowance for small changes. Declining a retainer is a legitimate choice — you just get a documented pipeline your own team can run, and you make that decision knowingly.

Web on React/Next.js, Vue/Nuxt or Astro; backends on Node/NestJS, Python/Django or FastAPI, Go, or PHP 8.2+; mobile on Swift and SwiftUI for iOS, Kotlin for Android, or React Native and Flutter for cross-platform. The stack is chosen per project against your constraints — not every project uses every one of these.

Because the right answer differs. An ashram that cannot carry a maintenance contract got 21 KB of static HTML on Bootstrap that will still work in a decade. A publisher whose editors will not leave WordPress got engineering work done around WordPress. Regional news editions that need stories crawlable immediately got server-rendered Next.js. Picking one stack for every client is a preference, not an engineering decision.

Usually, yes — and usually the cause is rendering strategy, unbounded third-party scripts, or images shipped at the wrong size, in that order. A one-week audit gives you before-and-after Lighthouse numbers, a rendering audit showing what crawlers actually see, and a prioritised fix list with effort estimates.

Yes — as a design system rather than a set of pictures: tokens, type scale, spacing, and every component designed with its loading, empty and error states, since those are most of what users actually see. Accessibility is checked at design time, not retrofitted after.

Fixed-scope projects are invoiced in stages tied to delivery — typically a deposit to start, one or more payments at agreed milestones, and a balance at handover. Retainers are invoiced monthly in advance. Nothing is billed for work that has not been done.

No, and deliberately so. Hosting, domains and third-party licences stay in your name and on your card, because software you cannot pay the bills for is software you do not really own. Typical running costs are estimated during discovery so the total is not a surprise, and the platforms used here mostly have generous free tiers.

Yes — either on a hosted platform when you want to run it yourself with no engineering on call, or custom when the catalogue, pricing rules or checkout genuinely do not fit an off-the-shelf platform. That choice gets made in discovery, and the honest recommendation is often the hosted one.

Yes — Razorpay, Stripe, PayPal and similar. Payment work is done server-side with webhook verification and idempotency handling, because the failure mode that matters is not a broken checkout, it is a customer charged twice or an order that never records.

Yes, if that is a requirement — say so in discovery, because it changes the build. Options run from a headless CMS to a simple admin surface to plain markdown files, and the right one depends on who is editing and how often. If nobody will actually edit it, a CMS is cost with no return.

Yes. Four sites in this portfolio serve Hindi content, three of them as server-rendered Devanagari with the correct language declaration and structured data so search engines index them properly. Multi-language support is a build-time decision rather than a plugin, so raise it in discovery.