Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. Our dedicated developer model embeds senior engineers directly in your team. They attend your standups, use your project management tools, and report to your engineering managers exactly like in-house employees. Minimum engagement is 3 months. Engineers work 40 hours per week with meaningful timezone overlap for your location. Most clients who start with a 3-month engagement extend to 12 to 24 months.

Senior-only team. We do not put junior developers on production code. Every pull request requires a code review from a second experienced engineer before merge. Automated test suites are written alongside features, not retrospectively, targeting 80 percent coverage on core business logic. All production deployments go through staging with automated smoke testing. We have never had a client lose production data due to a deployment we executed.

Yes, always. You communicate directly with the engineers building your product, not through an account manager acting as a proxy. We believe the fastest way to solve a technical problem is to put the person who understands it in direct conversation with the person who has it. Account managers exist to handle contracts and invoices, not to gatekeep technical discussion.

We maintain a bench of qualified engineers at each seniority level and specialisation. If an engineer leaves a project, we replace them within 5 business days and cover the onboarding cost ourselves. Departing engineers are required to complete a detailed handover document before their last day. Continuity of delivery is our responsibility, not yours.

We work in 2-week sprints with a working, deployed demo available every Friday. Sprint planning, daily standups, retrospectives, and backlog refinement follow standard Scrum practice. If your team uses a different methodology such as Kanban or Shape Up, we adapt. The goal is effective delivery, not methodology compliance.

Yes. We build custom WordPress themes from scratch without page builders, and custom plugins with object-oriented PHP following WordPress coding standards. We also build WooCommerce extensions, headless WordPress sites with Next.js frontends, and WordPress multisite networks. Our WordPress products are available in the Products section of this site.

Every product purchase includes 6 months of support covering bug fixes, compatibility updates with new WordPress and PHP versions, and clarifying questions about configuration. Support is provided via email and typically responds within 1 business day. Extended support and priority support plans are available on request.

Yes. We offer a customisation service for all our products at our standard hourly rate. Submit a customisation request via the contact form with a description of what you need, and we will provide a fixed-price quote within 24 hours. Custom modifications are delivered within the purchased product and do not affect your ability to receive future updates.

If a product does not work as described and we cannot resolve the issue within 72 hours of a support request, we issue a full refund with no questions asked. Refunds are not available for change-of-mind purchases, incompatibility with third-party plugins not listed as compatible, or issues caused by server environments below the minimum requirements stated in the product documentation.

Most projects begin with a 1 to 2 week paid discovery and architecture sprint. This produces a detailed system design document, technical specification, data model, API contract, and an accurate project estimate with line-item breakdown. Development follows in 2-week agile sprints with a working, deployed demo available every Friday. You know exactly where your project stands at every point in the engagement.

100 percent of the code, architecture, and intellectual property is yours from day one. IP assignment is included in our standard contract. We retain no rights to use your code, architecture, or business logic in any form. Full source code, inline documentation, deployment runbooks, and architecture decision records are delivered at project completion, or at any point on request during the engagement.

Yes, this is one of our most common engagement models. We integrate with your existing team, adopt your code standards, use your repositories and project management tools, and contribute through your pull request and code review process. We can work as a staff augmentation, as a dedicated squad alongside your team, or as the primary engineering team with your technical lead providing direction.

Yes. MVP development for early-stage startups is a core part of our business. We are direct about scope: we help you identify the smallest thing you can build to validate your hypothesis, and we build that, not a polished v3. Our MVP process starts with a product brief that defines the core user journey, the acceptance criteria, and the success metric. We do not start writing code until that is agreed.

Send us a message via the contact form or email us at hello@keybrains.io with a brief description of your project. We will respond within 2 business hours to schedule a 30-minute discovery call. On that call, we learn about your project, timeline, and budget. If there is a fit, we propose an engagement structure and timeline within 48 hours. No sales pressure, no follow-up emails if you decide not to proceed.

A well-defined MVP typically costs Rs. 12 to 35 lakhs and takes 8 to 14 weeks. A full SaaS platform typically costs Rs. 50 to 150 lakhs over 5 to 9 months. Dedicated developer rates depend on seniority and specialisation. We provide a detailed estimate with a line-item breakdown and risk factors after the discovery call. We never quote a vague range chosen to win the conversation and then expand scope after contract signing.

Both, depending on what is right for the project. Fixed price works well when the scope is well-defined upfront and unlikely to change significantly. Time and materials works better for exploratory product development, dedicated team engagements, and projects where requirements evolve rapidly. We are transparent about the tradeoffs and recommend the model that protects your interests, not ours.

Every project includes 30 days of complimentary bug-fix support after launch covering defects introduced during our development. After that, most clients move to a monthly maintenance retainer covering security patches, dependency updates, infrastructure monitoring, and minor feature work. Critical incident SLA: 2-hour response, 8-hour resolution target for production-down scenarios. We have never missed a critical incident SLA.

Fixed-price engagements: any scope change is costed and requires written approval before work begins. If we mis-estimate scope through our own error, we absorb the overrun. We have not passed an estimation error cost to a client in 3 years. Time-and-materials engagements: you receive weekly hour reports and can adjust scope in real time. There are no surprise invoices.

Yes. Indian clients pay in INR via bank transfer, and we provide GST-compliant invoices. International clients pay in USD, GBP, AED, or SGD via wire transfer or Wise. All payment terms are net 15 on milestone invoices for fixed-price projects, or net 7 on monthly invoices for dedicated team engagements.

We choose technology to match requirements rather than defaulting to what we are most comfortable with. Our most-used stack: React or Next.js frontend, Node.js or Python backend, PostgreSQL database, AWS or GCP infrastructure, Docker and Kubernetes deployment. Mobile: React Native or Flutter. AI and ML: Python, PyTorch, FastAPI, Hugging Face ecosystem. We also work extensively with PHP, Laravel, Java, Go, Swift, Kotlin, and Solidity.

Yes. Project rescue is a specialisation of ours. We begin every rescue with a 1-week paid code audit that produces a detailed written assessment covering architecture quality, security posture, test coverage, technical debt prioritisation, and realistic effort to complete or stabilise. We tell you exactly what we find. If the codebase is genuinely unsalvageable and a clean rebuild is the right answer, we will tell you that directly rather than taking on expensive remediation work that cannot succeed.

We build for the scale you need in the next 18 to 24 months, not hypothetical future scale that never arrives. Over-engineering an MVP is as damaging as under-engineering it. We make explicit decisions about where to invest in scalability now versus later, document those decisions in architecture decision records, and revisit them at each major milestone. You will always know what the scaling constraints are and when they will become relevant.

Security is embedded in our engineering process, not added at the end. All data is encrypted at rest using AES-256 and in transit using TLS 1.3. Access is controlled with role-based permissions and the principle of least privilege. Secrets are managed via AWS Secrets Manager or HashiCorp Vault and never stored in code or environment files. We follow OWASP secure coding practices and run automated security scanning on every pull request.

Yes. We can design, provision, and manage your entire cloud infrastructure on AWS, GCP, or Azure. Infrastructure is defined as code using Terraform so it is fully reproducible and version-controlled. We set up CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, alerting, and on-call rotation. If you want to manage infrastructure in-house eventually, we document everything thoroughly and run a handover process to upskill your team.

Unit tests cover core business logic with a minimum 80 percent coverage target. Integration tests cover API contracts and database interactions. End-to-end tests cover the primary user journeys using Playwright or Cypress. All tests run automatically on every pull request in CI. No code merges to main without passing tests and a passing code review. Performance testing runs against staging before every major release.

We work with seed-stage startups, Series A-C scale-ups, and established enterprises across fintech, healthtech, edtech, logistics, e-commerce, and SaaS. Our sweet spot is ambitious technology companies that need senior engineering talent and strategic architecture guidance without the overhead of building a full in-house team immediately. Clients range from 2-person founding teams to 500-person enterprises across 20+ countries.

For a new project engagement, we can typically have a dedicated team starting discovery within 5 to 7 business days of contract signing. For dedicated developer hiring, we present qualified, pre-screened candidates within 3 business days. Specialised roles such as Rust engineers or ML research engineers may take 10 to 14 days to source. We do not compromise on talent quality to meet an arbitrary start date.

Yes, always. Before any confidential project discussion begins, we sign mutual NDAs covering your business plans, technical architecture, intellectual property, and any sensitive data shared during the engagement. Our standard NDA has no expiration date and explicitly covers every team member assigned to your project.

Yes. Over 60 percent of our clients are based outside India, primarily in the UK, UAE, USA, Singapore, and Australia. All project management, communication, and delivery happens in English. We maintain meaningful timezone overlap for clients in any major region and schedule weekly calls at times that work for both sides.

We have deep domain knowledge in fintech (payment processing, lending platforms, investment tools), healthtech (patient-facing apps, clinical systems, HIPAA-compliant infrastructure), edtech (LMS platforms, live learning tools), logistics (route optimisation, fleet management, last-mile delivery), and B2B SaaS. We also work across e-commerce, real estate, and enterprise software. Our technology expertise transfers across industries, but domain knowledge matters for product decisions and compliance requirements.