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Fixed-Price BuildsNext.js & Astro4-12 Week DeliveryMilestone Billing30-Day Warranty

Project-Based Development Services

Fixed scope. Fixed price. Ship date or refund the delta.

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4-12 wks
Delivery window
Scope-locked at SOW
5,000+
Sites shipped
Since 2012
$15K-$80K
Typical range
Published on /pricing
30 days
Post-launch warranty
Bug fixes included
What is project-based development?

Project-based development is a fixed-scope, fixed-price engagement where your team hires a senior engineering pod to build a defined deliverable, such as a marketing site, a WordPress migration, or a SaaS MVP, within a locked timeline of 4 to 12 weeks. You pay against milestones, not hours. The scope is frozen at the signed SOW, and if we miss the ship date, you receive a refund on the delta. This model works when you need a finite build shipped and handed over, not an ongoing retainer or a headcount addition. At Social Animal, your project runs on Next.js or Astro, deploys to Vercel, and stores data in Supabase. You get full Github repo access on day one, not after the engagement ends. A dedicated lead engineer, a performance QA pass, and a 30-day post-launch warranty covering bug fixes are included in every engagement. Typical projects range from $15K for a marketing site to $80K or more for complex migrations and enterprise redesigns. You own every line of code at handover.

Your Current Site May Be a Liability

Common gaps we find in nearly every audit.

You need a site shipped in 8 weeks but cannot hire 3 engineers for 6 months
Risk: Every month of delay costs you pipeline. A $25K site that slips 3 months burns $40K+ in lost campaign ROI and internal coordination.
Your agency bills T&M and the final invoice is 2x the estimate
Risk: Time-and-materials pricing on fixed deliverables punishes you for scope creep the agency introduced. You absorb risk that should sit with the builder.
Freelancers from Upwork or Toptal disappear mid-project
Risk: A ghosted build at 60% completion means you pay twice: once for the abandoned code, again for the engineer who rewrites it. Median recovery cost is $12K-$30K.
You cannot evaluate code quality until after launch
Risk: Without Github access and CI/CD transparency during the build, you inherit technical debt you cannot see until performance tanks or the next team audits.
Post-launch bugs have no owner
Risk: Most agencies close the ticket the day they invoice final payment. A critical bug on launch week with no warranty means you're hiring emergency help at 2-3x rates.
Your WordPress site is slow, insecure, and blocking your SEO roadmap
Risk: Every month on a legacy CMS with 3+ second load times costs you 15-30% of organic traffic versus a sub-1-second Jamstack build. Google measures Core Web Vitals in real time.

What We Build

Purpose-built features for your industry.

Scope-locked SOW with published pricing

Your project price is fixed at SOW signature. We publish starting rates on /pricing so you can budget before the first call. No T&M surprises, no change-order games.

Milestone billing tied to deliverables

You pay when we ship working code, not when a sprint ends. Typical cadence: 30% at kickoff, 40% at staging review, 30% at launch. Each milestone has acceptance criteria you sign off on.

Production stack handover from day one

Your Github repo, Vercel project, and Supabase instance are provisioned under your accounts at project start. You own the infrastructure before we write the first component.

Senior-only engineering pods

Every project ships with a lead engineer (7+ years), a performance QA specialist, and a technical PM. No junior rotation, no offshore handoffs mid-build.

Ship-date guarantee with refund clause

If we miss the agreed launch date due to our delay, you receive a pro-rated refund on the outstanding milestone. The risk of timeline slip sits with us, not you.

30-day post-launch warranty

Bug fixes, deployment issues, and edge-case rendering problems are covered for 30 days after launch at zero additional cost. Your Slack channel stays active through the warranty window.

Our Development Process

From discovery to launch. Quality at every step.

01

Scope and price lock

Week 0

You walk through requirements on a 45-minute call. Within 48 hours you receive a fixed-price SOW with line-item deliverables, acceptance criteria, and a calendar with milestone dates. No ambiguity, no open-ended estimates.

02

Stack provisioning and design sprint

Week 1-2

Your Github repo, Vercel project, and Supabase instance go live under your accounts. The lead engineer and designer run a focused sprint on information architecture, wireframes, and component inventory. You review async in Figma.

03

Build sprints with weekly staging deploys

Week 3-8

Code ships to a staging URL every Friday. You review in-browser, leave comments in Linear, and approve or request changes before the next sprint. No black-box development, no big-bang reveal.

04

Performance QA and launch prep

Week 9-10

Your site passes a Lighthouse audit targeting 90+ across all four categories. We run cross-browser testing, accessibility checks (WCAG 2.1 AA), and a structured SEO audit covering meta, schema, and Core Web Vitals before go-live.

05

Launch and warranty activation

Week 11-12

DNS cutover, CDN warm-up, and monitoring dashboards go live. Your 30-day warranty window opens. The Slack channel stays active for bug reports, and your team receives a full handover document covering deployment, environment variables, and CMS access.

Social Animal

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Frequently Asked Questions

Project-based pricing locks your total cost at SOW signature. You pay a fixed dollar amount tied to milestone deliverables, not hours logged. Time-and-materials billing, which most agencies default to, charges you for every hour spent regardless of efficiency. That means scope creep, slow feedback loops, and junior engineer learning curves all inflate your invoice. With our model, a $25K marketing site costs $25K whether the build takes 160 hours or 220. The risk of inefficiency sits with us. If your requirements change mid-build, we issue a formal change order with a new fixed price before any additional work begins. You always know the number before you approve.
Your warranty covers bug fixes, rendering issues, deployment failures, and edge-case browser behavior for 30 calendar days after launch. If a component breaks on Safari, a form fails to submit, or a deployment pipeline errors out, we fix it at zero additional cost within 24 hours of your Slack report. The warranty does not cover new feature requests, design changes, or third-party API outages outside our control. Most clients report 2 to 5 warranty tickets in the first 30 days. After warranty, you can transition to a monthly retainer starting at $5K/month or engage us on a new project SOW.
Toptal and Upwork match you with individual contractors. You manage the project, review the code, handle deployment, and absorb the risk if the freelancer underperforms or disappears. Our project-based model gives you a full pod: lead engineer, QA specialist, and technical PM, all accountable to a ship-date guarantee with a refund clause. Toptal's typical senior rate is $150-$200/hour with no scope lock. A 400-hour build at those rates runs $60K-$80K with no ceiling. Our equivalent fixed-price engagement for a migration or redesign is $25K-$60K with the price locked at SOW. You also own the infrastructure from day one, something marketplace freelancers rarely provision under your accounts.
Your project ships on Next.js or Astro depending on your content model and interactivity needs. Marketing sites and content-heavy builds typically run on Astro for its zero-JS default and sub-second load times. SaaS MVPs, authenticated dashboards, and dynamic applications run on Next.js with React Server Components. Hosting deploys to Vercel. Data and auth use Supabase. Your CMS is typically Sanity or Contentful, chosen based on your editorial workflow. Every project includes a Github repo under your org, CI/CD via Github Actions, and preview deployments on every pull request. You're never locked into a proprietary platform or a build tool only we can maintain.
Scope changes go through a formal change-order process. Your PM documents the new requirement, estimates the additional cost as a fixed line item, and presents it for your written approval before any work begins. This protects you from invisible scope creep. If you decline the change order, the original SOW and price remain intact. Most projects see 1 to 2 minor change orders. If a change request would push the timeline beyond your launch date, we flag the tradeoff explicitly: you can defer the feature to a post-launch phase or accept a revised delivery date. No surprises, no passive invoice inflation.
Marketing sites ship in 4 to 6 weeks. WordPress migrations and redesigns run 6 to 10 weeks depending on page count and content complexity. SaaS MVPs range from 8 to 12 weeks for a core feature set. Your timeline is locked in the SOW with specific milestone dates. We don't start without a confirmed calendar. If your internal approvals or content delivery delays a milestone, the timeline shifts accordingly. Delays caused by our team trigger the refund clause on the affected milestone. The fastest project we shipped in 2024 was a 47-page marketing site on Astro in 19 business days.
Yes. You own every line of code, every design asset, and every configuration file from day one, not just at handover. Your Github repo lives under your organization's account. Your Vercel project and Supabase instance are provisioned under your billing. If you fire us on day three, you still have full access to everything built so far. There's no IP assignment clause buried in the contract because there's nothing to assign: it was always yours. This is the single biggest difference between our model and agencies that host your site on their infrastructure and hold your code until final payment clears.
A $15K to $25K marketing site typically includes 10 to 30 designed pages built on Astro or Next.js, a headless CMS (Sanity or Contentful) with editorial training, responsive design across mobile and desktop, structured data markup, a Lighthouse score targeting 90+ on all four categories, contact or lead-gen forms with email integration, basic analytics setup (GA4 or Plausible), and the 30-day post-launch warranty. The price varies based on page count, custom illustration or animation, and third-party integrations like HubSpot or Salesforce. You receive a line-item quote, not a range, within 48 hours of your scoping call.
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