Why we stopped selling hours

Hourly billing has served the industry for decades, and most contractors we know do honest work on it. Kiwis generally do their best by each other. The quiet flaw is not the people; it is the shape of the arrangement.

Hourly contracts are kept short on purpose. That is not stinginess, it is how a sensible owner controls risk: commit to a sprint or two, see what shows up, extend if it goes well. The work gets funded a slice at a time, and one day the budget ends. The contractor wraps up and moves on, exactly as the deal intended.

Budgets end. Businesses don't.

The software the contract leaves behind still needs to be maintained, patched, and updated, because your business keeps moving after the invoices stop. And when the next idea arrives, six months or a year later, the person who built the last thing is on another job. So you go looking again, pay the onboarding cost again, and explain your business from zero to someone who has no context of it: why the pricing works the way it does, which customers matter most, where the last three ideas came from and why two of them died.

That repeated restart is the real cost of buying software by the hour. Not the rate. The forgetting.

What a long-term partner compounds

We run SurpCode the other way around. The work is priced against the revenue it creates for your business. Sometimes that is a fixed price tied to an agreed outcome. Sometimes we go further and fund the build ourselves, taking payment as a share of the revenue the product earns. Either way, the incentive points in one direction: your number has to move, and it has to keep moving.

That changes the shape of the relationship, not just the invoice:

Context accumulates instead of evaporating. The second project starts with everything learned in the first. Nobody re-explains the business, nobody pays an onboarding bill, and ideas go from conversation to live URL faster each time.

Maintenance is part of the deal, not an afterthought. Because our earnings ride on the software working, keeping it healthy is our problem. There is no moment where the budget ends and the software starts quietly rotting.

New ideas have somewhere to land. When you spot the next opportunity, the partner who already knows your business is on the other end of an email, same day. That is when the pace really shows.

Like most good investments and most good relationships, the value comes from time in, not timing. The tenth month of a partnership is worth more than the first, and it keeps compounding from there.

What we ask in return

Result pricing only works with a measurable result. Before any code, we agree on the number we are moving: bookings, orders, repeat customers, hours saved that turn into capacity. If we cannot name the number together, we will tell you that software is not your bottleneck, and part as friends.