Questions
The answers, including the awkward ones.
These are the concerns that quietly end deals: price, ownership, team size and what happens if you want to leave. Answering them here filters out enquiries that were never going to convert and reassures the people who only needed a clear answer.
Working with us
Cambotix is a small senior team, and we tell you that up front. You work directly with the engineers building your system. There is no account manager relaying messages, and nobody quietly outsourcing your project. When a piece of work needs a specialist we do not have, we say so rather than improvise.
Around $2,500, typically for a technical audit or discovery sprint. Below that, the contract, scoping and handover work can cost more than the value you receive. A freelancer on an hourly basis may serve you better, and we will say so.
A written update every week covering what shipped, what is in progress and what is blocked, plus a call whenever it is useful. You get direct access to the person building your system. What we do not do is go quiet for a month and then reveal something.
Yes, before discovery if you prefer. Our standard service agreement already includes mutual confidentiality, and we are happy to sign yours instead.
Yes. We regularly work alongside in-house developers. Sometimes we own one part while they own another; other times we review the architecture. It works when responsibilities are clear from the start, so we define them during scoping.
Cost & contracts
Because we may be quoting for different work. A lower quote often excludes discovery, testing, deployment, migration, documentation and handover. Those are the parts that determine whether the system still works in a year. Compare the line items, not only the totals. If the cheaper quote genuinely covers everything, take it.
On fixed-price phases, our estimate is our responsibility. You pay the agreed amount. Timelines change only when the scope changes or when we are waiting on you, and both are tracked in writing.
A deposit of around 40%, followed by milestone payments, with the balance due at delivery. We never ask for 100% up front, and you should be wary of anyone who does.
You can terminate with written notice. You pay for work completed to that point and you receive everything produced so far: code, designs, documentation. No penalty clause, no held hostage repository.
AI & automation
The work that happens often, follows a pattern and costs real hours: reading documents, re-entering data between tools, answering the same customer questions, assembling reports. We rank your workflows by hours saved against the cost of a mistake, automate one, prove the number, and only then expand. Starting with the hardest workflow is how AI projects fail.
No. We use the business tiers of AI providers, which do not train on your data, under accounts in your name. Where data must not leave your premises at all, such as patient or payroll records, we run an open model on your own servers. The arrangement is written into the service agreement, not left to a provider's terms page.
It will, sometimes, and we design for that rather than pretend otherwise. Wherever an error would be expensive, a person reviews before anything is sent or saved. Low-confidence cases are routed to staff, every decision is logged, and you see measured accuracy on your own data before launch. Wrong and silent is the failure we design against.
We automate tasks, not jobs. In practice it removes the part of the job people like least, and the hours come back to work that needs judgment or a relationship. What you do with those hours is your decision, and we will give you an honest estimate of how many there are before you commit.
No. The automation is ordinary, documented code with the AI model behind one interface, so a regular developer can maintain it and the model can be swapped when a better or cheaper one appears. Many clients keep us on a retainer to monitor accuracy and running cost, but it is optional and you own everything either way.
Technical
You do, in full, after final payment. We transfer the repository, documentation and infrastructure access to your organization. We keep no license or kill switch, and the system does not depend on our continued involvement.
You can, and the handover is designed for it: documented code, a written runbook, standard technologies and no proprietary framework of ours in the middle. A team that makes itself hard to replace is protecting itself, not you.
On infrastructure you own, using accounts registered in your name. We usually use AWS or a VPS when that fits the budget better. We configure everything and hand over the credentials. Your data never sits in a Cambotix account.
Access control enforced server-side rather than in the client, secrets kept out of the repository, dependencies patched, encrypted transport, and a security review before go-live. For systems handling payments or personal data we scope this explicitly rather than assuming defaults are enough.
We focus testing where failure is expensive, including money movement, access control and order state. We do not chase a coverage percentage. Twenty useful tests are better than four hundred that nobody reads.
After launch
We fix any defect in the delivered scope at no charge for 30 to 60 days after launch, depending on project size. New features go through a change request or a retainer.
No. Plenty of clients take the system in-house after handover, which is a fair outcome. A retainer makes sense when you want continuous improvement and someone accountable for uptime, not because you are locked in.
Under a standard retainer, we respond by the next business day. If your operation needs a faster response, we define and price that commitment clearly. We will not imply a response time we cannot meet.
Question not answered here?
Ask it directly. We would rather spend ten minutes on a straight answer than have you guess.