Cambridge is world-class at prototypes and then ships them to customers

Productionising a single workflow with authentication, tenancy and deployment usually runs £35,000 to £70,000. A full commercial product wrapped around an existing research core is £75,000 to £150,000. Anything that falls under medical device software rules starts higher because the documentation burden is real engineering work.

Usually keep it, wrapped rather than rewritten. The scientific core is often correct and hard-won; what is missing is everything around it. We typically isolate the research code behind a versioned interface, add tests around its known behaviour, and rebuild the ingestion, orchestration and interface layers. That preserves knowledge and costs far less than a rewrite.

It might, and finding out late is expensive. If output informs diagnosis or treatment, UK medical device rules and MHRA registration can apply, which brings IEC 62304 development process expectations. Get a regulatory view before architecture is fixed, because retrofitting a design history file and traceability into a finished system costs more than building with it.

Expect the Data Security and Protection Toolkit and the Digital Technology Assessment Criteria to appear in procurement, along with detailed questions on data residency, access control and incident response. Build to those from the start. Cambridge companies that treat NHS assurance as a post-build paperwork exercise routinely lose a quarter to remediation.

For most Cambridge builds, 16 to 24 weeks. The gating items are self-serve onboarding, error messages a non-expert can act on, and admin tooling for your support staff. We usually sequence those before cosmetic work, because they are what actually removes the founder from the room.

Identity, payments, transactional email, error tracking, analytics and file storage. All of it is commodity, all of it is better than what you would write, and none of it is why a customer chooses you. Spend your budget on the 30 percent that is genuinely yours. Cambridge teams with strong engineers are unusually prone to building auth for fun.

You do, and it must be explicit in the contract before a line is written, including any libraries created during the project. This matters more in Cambridge than most places because your IP position is what investors and acquirers are actually buying, and an ambiguity in a development agreement surfaces at exactly the worst moment in diligence.

You can, and eventually you should, but hiring four experienced product engineers in Cambridge takes months and you are competing with Arm, AstraZeneca, Microsoft Research and every funded spinout. The common pattern is agency build with one or two internal engineers embedded, then transfer ownership as you hire.

Plan on 15 to 25 percent of the build cost annually covering hosting, dependency and security updates, and a steady flow of small changes. Add more if you are regulated, because change control and revalidation are not free. Treating post-launch as optional is the most common reason a good Cambridge product decays inside two years.

For testing whether anyone wants the product, yes, and Bubble's paid plans start at $29 a month, which is the cheapest validation you will ever buy. The ceiling arrives with complex data relationships, heavy integrations, performance at a few thousand users, and the fact that you cannot export a Bubble app to servers you control. A path many Digital Heroes clients take: prove demand on no-code, then rebuild custom once revenue justifies it, treating the no-code version as a paid prototype rather than a foundation.

Do the arithmetic on hours before anything else: if the system saves three staff eight hours a week at a $35 loaded hourly cost, that is about $43,700 a year against, say, a $70,000 build plus 15 to 20% annual maintenance, a payback around two years. Add revenue effects only if you can name them specifically, like faster quotes or fewer abandoned orders, not as vague growth. In our delivery experience the businesses that see payback inside 24 months are the ones automating a process they already measure.

Choosing the lowest bid, paying more than 30-40% upfront instead of on milestones, skipping a written specification, and having no maintenance plan for after launch. The most expensive of the four in Digital Heroes rescue projects is the missing spec: without written acceptance criteria, done becomes an argument instead of a checklist, and every disagreement resolves in the vendor's favor. Fix those four and you have avoided most of the ways these projects fail.

A solo freelancer is a fine choice for a well-defined build under roughly $15,000 to $20,000 with a limited lifespan: an internal calculator, a scripted integration, a prototype. Above $50,000, or for any system your business will depend on for years, you are buying continuity as much as code: enforced code review, cover when someone is ill, and support that outlasts one person's career plans. Price the risk of a single point of failure, not just the hourly rate.

Three to five for a typical focused build: a project lead, one or two engineers, a designer, and part-time QA, which is the standard shape across 2,000+ Digital Heroes projects. Larger platforms justify 6 to 10, but a ten-person team on a small first version usually signals bill padding rather than horsepower. What predicts success is whether a senior engineer is writing your code daily, not the headcount on the proposal.

You should own everything, assigned in writing: the contract transfers full IP to you on final payment, the code lives in your GitHub organization, and hosting runs in cloud accounts you control. The red flag is a proposal that mentions the agency's proprietary platform or framework, which usually means you are renting, not buying. Digital Heroes structures every build this way precisely so a client can fire us and lose nothing but the relationship.

Digital Heroes builds custom software systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. The work is delivered remotely: our engineers work from Delhi and Lucknow, leadership is in New York, and some team members live in London and Sydney and work remotely from there. We have no office in Cambridge. You can chat with the team directly, and every form gets an email reply within 24 hours.