Dedicated Development Teams that work only on your roadmap, month after month.

By who owns delivery. Hiring dedicated developers one at a time is staff augmentation: individual contributors filling named skill gaps under your direct management. A dedicated software development team is an autonomous unit with its own Project Manager or Lead, running internal processes and owning delivery quality, while your leads set priorities and the roadmap. A managed team goes further: a named unicrew delivery lead owns the plan and the outcome too, which fits when your own engineering leadership has no bandwidth to run another team. The choice between those two models is worked through in managed delivery versus team extension.

A dedicated team is team extension, billed monthly per team member rather than quoted against a scope, and there is no recruitment or placement fee: nothing separate is charged for sourcing, vetting or placing an engineer. The head of IT at a European e-commerce retailer, in a verified Clutch review, on the vetting: "They don’t charge us for that part of the service." What a specific team costs turns on its shape rather than a headline rate: the roles, the seniority mix and how long you need the capacity, which discovery settles. Which billing model suits which work is argued out in time and materials versus fixed fee.

Usually open-ended. Most dedicated teams have no end date at all, because the roadmap keeps going, and there is no minimum engagement period. The head of development at a Latvian IT company, in a verified Clutch review: "Development is still ongoing, and our project doesn’t have a definite end date." Starting is fast, because staffing a team is selection rather than recruitment from scratch: in our delivery experience that cuts hiring timelines by up to 50% against hiring the same people yourself, and most engagements start within two to four weeks. Discovery produces the actual dates.

Yes, and clients buy this shape precisely so they are not carrying a full team through a quiet quarter. The head of IT at a European e-commerce retailer describes the rhythm in a verified Clutch review: "We typically work on projects for 3–6 months and then scale down. Once there’s another project, we scale up our resources again." Adding a role mid-engagement is the same motion in reverse. The CTO of a German climate-tech startup, on Clutch: "They return with two or three high-quality developers when we need another resource." Scaling down is a conversation about notice and handover rather than a penalty, and the roles that come off are agreed in the phase review rather than sprung on you.

Yes, and taking over something that already exists is a large share of what our dedicated teams do: we refactored a decade-old waiver platform onto Yii 2.0 while hundreds of its clients kept using it, and moved a US B2B SaaS platform off its previous vendor without disrupting the business. Integrations and dependencies get mapped during discovery, because that is where schedule risk lives.

Whatever your contract says, and that is settled before anyone starts rather than at the end. Ownership of the source code, the documentation and the intellectual property, and the terms on which it comes to you, are written into the agreement we sign alongside the NDAs. Ask to read those clauses before you commit, here and with any partner. Documentation stays current throughout, so moving the work in-house stays a decision you can make.

We work on a local-time alignment model. Our project managers and engineers work from Ukraine, Poland, Estonia and the UK, so we assign a team that matches your business hours and stand-ups sit inside them. Clients run day to day on their own tools, Jira, Shortcut, GitHub, Google Meet or WhatsApp, rather than a portal we impose.

Smaller than most people picture, and the shape follows the work. Three real ones, from three verified Clutch reviews. A US waiver platform runs three, in its CEO's Clutch review: "We work with three people on a full-time basis: two developers and one QA engineer." A London booking-software company lists seven, in its CEO's Clutch review: "One Lead Developer, One Backend Developer, Two Front End Developers, One Mobile Developer, One QA Tester, One Project Manager". A German food producer, in its digital manager's Clutch review, runs "one project manager and up to four developers" per project, currently two. Size is not fixed either: as a product moves from MVP to production we add DevOps, QA automation, business analysis or design, and drop roles when the phase ends.

Every engagement runs under our ISO 27001:2022 and ISO 9001:2015 certifications, renewed through a multi-stage audit with Quay Audit UK, with contracts and NDAs signed before anyone starts. We do not hold SOC 2, and we say so rather than let you assume it. If security is a first-order concern, ask us where your code and data live and who can reach them, how secrets are handled, what the incident response expectations are, and what the rules are for AI tool usage on your code. Put the same four to any partner.

Every vendor promises senior engineers and continuity, this page included, so a comparison only gets useful below the category. Four things are checkable from outside; put all four to us. Who employs the engineers: ours are unicrew employees rather than a subcontractor chain, which decides whether the person who wrote the code is reachable in month twelve. Whether the people in the proposal are the people who start, and what happens when one of them leaves. The review URL rather than the rating, and where a tally comes from: every client quoted here links their own review, and our counts are computed, 18 of our 61 public Clutch reviews naming senior engineers who run the work and 34 naming delivery on time and on budget. And what you receive if the engagement ends next quarter: with us the ownership and transfer terms are settled in the contract before anyone starts, and the documentation is current enough to make that answer real.

Cover is our problem, not yours, and one client says that is what he bought. The founder of a US waiver-management platform, in his Clutch review: "We weren’t looking for superheroes, in terms of development, but rather for reliable, consistent people, with full backup solutions for cases like individuals going on vacation." In practice the same people tend to stay. The VP of IT at a US moving company, on Clutch: "The lead developer has been on this project since the beginning, and he’s been an instrumental liaison to me." And nobody on your pod is being shared out across other accounts. The same waiver-platform founder again, on Clutch: "Other firms that we’ve worked with have been distracted by side projects, whereas Artelogic has assigned full-time team members to work on our mission." We publish no tenure or retention figure of our own; those are three verified reviews, from two clients, describing what happened.

When nobody on your side can own priorities and answer the team's questions inside a day. The pod idles on your budget, and a managed team, where we carry that load, is the better buy. When you need one specialist for six weeks to close a named gap in a system that already works, that is staff augmentation or a hire. And when the scope is genuinely fixed and finished at launch, buy the scoped build instead and keep your money. We also turn down briefs whose entire content is a headcount and a rate, because there is nothing in them for anyone to own.