How we work — explicit, scoped to fit.
Five engagement shapes covering project, retainer, care plan, white-label, and team augmentation. Each is scoped explicitly. Each is priced fairly. Each is built around the relationship beyond launch.
Project
Retainer
Care plan
White-label
Team aug
Why this exists
Most engagement models are 'agency time' marked up.
Most agencies sell the same hourly engineers under different labels. We design our engagement models around the actual shape of the work — fixed-scope projects when scope is knowable, retainers when the cadence is regular, care plans when the operational reality is the work, white-label when the relationship is with another agency. The shape fits; the price reflects it.
What we hear most
The five shapes.
Project
Fixed-scope, fixed-quote engagement with milestone billing. Best for redesigns, migrations, new builds. Includes 30 days of post-launch support.
Retainer
Monthly hours (20h, 40h, 80h) with named senior engineer. Best for ongoing improvement work, growth surfaces, programmatic SEO, new template launches.
Care plan
Monthly maintenance covering updates, security, performance monitoring, reporting, and a bank of dev hours. Best for live sites that need accountability.
White-label
Senior development under NDA, shipped under another agency's brand. Best for design / marketing agencies augmenting in-house dev capacity.
Team augmentation
Named senior engineer working alongside your in-house team for a defined period. Best for projects where you have engineering capacity but need senior depth.
What we deliver
What's in each engagement.
Concrete deliverables and billing shape per engagement model.
Project
- Discovery call → fixed scope → fixed quote
- Milestone billing (typically 30/30/30/10)
- Senior team named at kickoff
- Weekly cadence with shipped progress
- 30 days post-launch support included
Retainer
- Monthly hours: 20h, 40h, 80h tiers
- Named senior engineer with backup coverage
- Slack channel with the team
- Quarterly site review
- Hours roll forward 90 days; reduced rate vs project
Care plan
- Updates, security, performance monitoring
- Monthly written report
- Incident response with SLA (24h or 4h)
- Bank of dev hours for small changes
- Quarterly site review
White-label
- NDA-first, anonymous or named at your choice
- Slack/comms branded under your studio
- Code on your repo, deployments to your client's hosting
- Designed for agency-pace communication
- Project, retainer, or care-plan shapes available
Team augmentation
- Named senior engineer for defined period
- Working alongside your in-house team
- Slack / standup integration with your team
- Code reviews against your standards
- Knowledge transfer documented
Process
How this service runs end to end
The same six-step shape we use across every Haxtiv project — adapted to the specifics of this scope.
01
Discover
Audit, intent, and the part nobody is saying out loud
We open with a working session — not a deck. We pull analytics, crawl the existing site, audit the brand, and interview the people closest to revenue. We surface the friction inside the team, not just the friction on the screen.
02
Define
Sitemap, story, and the metrics that actually matter
We define the audience journeys, the commercial pages we are willing to defend, the SEO architecture, and the measurable outcomes. You get a shape of the project that survives feedback because it was built on evidence.
03
Design
Editorial system, art-directed, never templated
Type, grid, motion, and tone built as a system. We design the hero, the long pages, the unloved corners, and the empty states. Every screen looks like it belongs to the same studio. Nothing is parked for later.
04
Build
Production code your team can keep
WordPress, Shopify, or page builder — we build clean, accessible, performant, and documented. Component-led, naming you'll recognize next year, and a changelog your in-house team can read.
05
Launch
Migration without losing rankings or sleep
Pre-launch crawl, redirect map, schema and metadata cutover, performance baseline, and a launch playbook. We run the deploy with you, not at you.
06
Grow
Care plan, CRO sprints, and quiet improvements
We stay involved. Monthly performance reports, security and core updates, and CRO sprints that compound. The site gets better the longer you keep us.
What this looks like in production
Numbers we earn, not numbers we round up.
Sites shipped
across 27 countries
Studio hours
delivered since 2019
Avg conversion lift
post-redesign clients
Client retention
into year two
In their words
Senior teams who chose us.
Haxtiv replatformed our marketing site without losing a single ranking. We saw organic leads up 38% inside the first quarter and the editorial team finally has a layout system they don't fight.
Mara Iglesias
VP Marketing · Lumenwave Health
Headless WordPress redesign
Our previous Shopify build was a Frankenstein of apps. The Haxtiv team simplified the stack, rebuilt the PDP and CRO patterns, and our store is faster and more profitable than it has ever been.
Daniel Korver
Founder · Northbound Goods
Shopify Plus rebuild
Frequently asked
Answers worth asking for.
Don't see the question you're holding? Send it to [email protected] and we'll answer the same day.
Start here
Brief us — we'll recommend the engagement that fits.
30-minute call. We'll listen, recommend, and share a fair quote.