AgileEngine

In-house engineers do all our work at our R&D centers in Ukraine and Argentina. Our engagement model revolves around dedicated teams that we custom-build based on our clients’ goals.

Our model supports on-site architects, consultants, and team leads or brief visits and business trips to the client’s location. We also encourage our clients to visit our R&D centers, meet their teams in person, and see how we work.

Our business model relies on the long-term integration of our experts into our clients’ product teams and development processes. This approach fosters a product mindset and an in-depth retained knowledge of the product and codebase.

Our software developers, QAs, designers, data engineers, and managers, effectively become our clients’ remote team members working on their products full-time. Some of them have spent more than three years working with the same client. In the case of some projects, our engineers do tech talks for our clients and visit their main offices in the US annually.

Our clients are top-ranked providers of software development tools and companies renowned as leaders in data, fintech, IoT, AR/VR, media, and other industries. These include well-established brands known to millions of people and prominent startups. In addition to these technologically-focused companies, we work with large clients from other industries. For instance, we’re part of the digital product development efforts of a worldwide cosmetics brand with a strong presence in 150 countries. We also build applications for the world’s top job search engine.

The time frame of software development projects is an equation with many variables:

Five years ago, UI development used to be undeniably simpler in terms of scope than backend development. Today, technologies like React and Angular make us write more client-side logic. In the meantime, things like AWS and Firebase have streamlined backend infrastructures to a point where simple apps can fully embrace the cloud. These two trends have narrowed the gap between UI and backend development to a certain extent. They also make estimations more complex. You need to factor in the variables from the previous question for both UI and backend development to estimate time frames.

The framework needs to be future-proof in two ways:

For both of these reasons, it’s often wiser to choose frameworks and tools that have been popular for at least a couple of years. New solutions that are skyrocketing in popularity can also be the right choice, yet I wouldn’t call them a safe bet.

JavaScript has been extremely popular in the past 3–5 years. Node for backend development, React, Angular, and Vue for web applications, React Native for mobile, Electron for desktop… This is a trend that we can’t ignore, which is why these technologies are at the core of our expertise today.
 

Historically, AgileEngine has also been significant on all things Java, and, to a slightly lesser extent, .Net. These used to rule supreme in enterprise development, and they still do in the case of older, larger companies. We also have many projects that involve Scala and Python, especially those in machine learning, big data, and AI space.
Accurate native mobile applications constitute a large part of our portfolio, which means Swift, Kotlin, Objective-C, and Java.

The size of the team, the specialization, experience, and seniority of the people in the team, and the project duration.

We use the Time and Material model because it offers our clients more control over their product development budget. Models like Fixed Cost and Pay per Feature work better for short-term projects with a clearly-defined scope. The development of websites and small mobile apps are good examples of such projects.

Most of our projects are long-term, with enormous scope and complexity. We build B2B software solutions for Fortune 500 companies and apps for multi-million audiences. At this scale, it’s more difficult for our clients to precisely estimate budgets early on. Most of our projects also use Lean and agile, which means changing requirements. Due to these two reasons, the flexibility of the Time and Material model works better for our clients and us.

On average, our rates are about 50% of what you would expect from US engineers with comparable experience and skillsets. These rates enable us to hire and retain the top 3% of engineers in Argentina and Ukraine. We rarely go below this point as far as pricing goes.

There are more factors involved in how we choose projects than just prices. These include the technology stack, team size and composition, our client’s approach to project management, long-term product strategy, and more. In our case, each project is unique.