Hand-over and after: why you do not have to depend on us

There is a question you should ask every small software provider, and you should ask it of us too: what if you are no longer around in three years? Our answer is not “trust us”. It is built into what you have in hand at the end of the eight weeks.

The question is fair

Cloudwerks is a small company. The person who designs your system is the same one who builds and hands it over. That is an advantage while the project is running – and a risk if it is not safeguarded. We safeguard it by building, from week one, as if someone else were going to carry the system forward.

What you receive at the end of the eight weeks

• A running system in your environment. Not on our machine, but where it was decided in week 1: in your infrastructure or in a European data centre.
• The source code. Fully documented. Which usage and ownership rights you hold in it is settled in the contract – to suit your project, and before we start.
• The documentation. What the system does, how it is structured, and why the important decisions were made the way they were.
• The access credentials. Server, database, app store account, integrations – everything needed to operate the system is in your hands.

Why another team could carry on

We build on a common, well-documented stack: Angular, Kotlin, Spring Boot, SQL, Android. These are not niche technologies you have to search long for. Any competent development team can continue with them – your own, another provider, or us.

On top of that, decisions and knowledge sit in one place and are written down. In larger projects knowledge is often lost because it was spread across many heads. With us it is in the documentation you receive.

The trial phase

After hand-over comes a trial phase of two to four weeks with real users in your company. It has a clear purpose: to find out what daily use has to say before you decide on further investment. What comes up in this time – a missing field, a step that gets in the way, a wish that only arises in use – is the best basis for the next step.

Three ways forward

Only after the trial do you decide how to continue. Not before.

• Build-out on a milestone basis. The items noted as build-out during the sprint, and what the trial has shown – as clearly delimited packages, each quoted in writing.
• Monthly development. If the software is to keep growing with your business over time.
• Take-over by your own team. Or by another provider. Documentation and access credentials are made for this from the start.

What the sprint does not include and what is agreed separately, we say up front: ongoing operations with on-call support, for instance, or an iOS app. Both are possible, both are quoted in writing, neither is silently part of the price.

What this means for you

You are not tied in at any point. After the sprint, after the trial and after every build-out package you can stop, switch or continue – and in all three cases the software keeps running. Every further step is a separate decision that is in front of you in writing before you make it.