Why Creotech moved from outsourcing to fixed-price MVP development

Creotech is a senior MVP studio. For the last five years, though, we sold something different: we were an outsourcing and outstaffing company — building software to other companies' specs and placing our engineers inside their teams. We are changing what we do — moving from that to fixed-price MVP development for funded founders — and this is the honest version of why.

Outsourcing and outstaffing are fine businesses. You deliver to someone else's spec, or rent skilled people by the month for someone else to direct. But both sell time and seats — bodies — and the work that made us proud was never the headcount or the ticket queue. It was the handful of early decisions that decide whether a product holds up. So we have moved Creotech to selling that instead.

From outsourcing to fixed-price MVP development

The timing is not an accident. Over the last couple of years the first version of almost any product became cheap to produce — a weekend with the right tools gets you auth, a database, a few screens, a deploy. We wrote about this in Speed stopped being the moat: when the first version is commoditised, the advantage moves to the version that survives contact with real users. That is a judgment problem, not a staffing one — and judgment is hard to rent by the month.

What we build now

Fixed-scope, fixed-price MVPs — mobile and web apps, and the backends behind them — built by the same senior team, in four to ten weeks. We name the scope and the price up front and hold both:

• Discovery (€5–8k) when the build still needs shaping.
• Launch (€15–20k) for a focused first version.
• Core (€35–45k) for a real product with the durable decisions made early.

If you are an AI-product company, we build the product around your model — the app, the onboarding, the dashboard, the billing — not the model itself. We stay in that lane. How we scope and sequence a build is in our process.

Who it is for

Funded pre-seed and seed founders, usually without an in-house CTO yet, who need a first version built right — or a contract-built v1 that now needs a real rebuild before it can carry another year of features. We work with founders worldwide; right now most of our conversations are across Europe and the Gulf. What we are selling is not speed. It is not having to rewrite the foundation in six months, right when you have found traction.

What does not change

The people. The same senior engineers — fourteen years of building software between us, including fintech at the scale of early Tide, and healthcare work on NHS-facing systems — are the ones who will build your MVP. That standard is where you learn which corners cost you later: get the data model, the boundaries, and the permissions right early, and almost everything else stays cheap to change.

What changes is the promise. Not engineers by the seat — outcomes with clean edges, built to last. If you are about to build, or rebuild, tell us what you are making.