They’re a great group of developers who really understand the reality of business.
Frequently Asked Questions
Feel free to contact us directly if you have any questions
I have an idea of an App with great potential, but don’t know how to start. Or I have a limited budget. What should I do?
Contact us. Itexus recommends starting with a consulting phase. We will help to elaborate the idea into a business plan, and create initial marketing materials that can be used to raise angel investment for your project.
- We will perform market and competition analysis.
- We will create a UI/UX design and clickable prototypes of the product for demonstrations.
- We will create a technical proposal and pick the best technology and third party components for your product architecture.
- We will help to pick the right scope of functionality for the minimum viable product for the available budget.
- We will provide a detailed feature list with cost estimates so that you will know how much money you will need.
- We will help you to start lean.
Initial consulting is a no-strings attached. You don’t have to work with us after this step. At the same time, we’ll do our best to help you, as it is our chance to show how we work and earn your trust.
How much is a typical project? How long does it take?
Itexus specializes in custom software development. Unlike a typical corporate website or simple e-stores, each product that we develop is unique, varying from simple mobile apps costing $6k+ taking 2 months to launch, to enterprise financial solutions with artificial intelligence capabilities costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and taking years to develop. Our approach to estimating a new project is quite thorough. We need to collect and document all the requirements, pick the right technical solution, perform a feature by feature breakdown of the functionality and estimate every feature separately. We perform the initial analysis phase free of charge. As a result of this phase the clients receive:
- Technical proposal with software architecture and third party components
- Requirements documentation with UI/UX mockups
- Detailed feature by feature breakdown of the functionality and estimate
Who owns the intellectual property? Can I patent the software that Itexus will develop?
All intellectual property rights to the software that we develop belong to the client, royalty free, and the client may patent his solution. Itexus will provide all possible cooperation to patent the solution.
When my project ends, are you able to provide additional support and work on the project in the future?
Yes absolutely. We will provide support and maintenance services and keep all knowledge to efficiently resume the project and develop new features if they are required. This is the benefit of using an outsourcing company versus an in house team. You can pause and resume your project with minimum overhead.
Can you take over my existing software project, maintain it and build on top of it?
Yes, we have vast experience of taking over existing software projects from previous teams. Sometimes with no up-to-date source code and documentation. We have a specialized Project rescue service to save projects that are in complicated state. The typical process to take over a project:
- As a first step conduct knowledge transfer from the existing team or documentation or code base.
- Find out what are the issues with the existing solution that need to be solved and what new functionality needs to be developed.
- Analyze the existing code quality and architecture.
- Provide a detailed report on what parts are in a good state and can be efficiently reused, and what parts need to be refactored.
- Test the existing application to find out what actually works and what needs to be fixed. Provide a testing report.
- Formulate the next steps plan jointly with the client, taking into account the business goals to release new functionality and technical needs to reduce technical debt and improve the architecture.
- Estimate agreed tasks and start working within agreed estimates.
Have you ever had an unhappy client? Describe the reasons for their complaints. What lessons did you learn?
Yes, unfortunately we have had unhappy clients. A typical situation leading to this scenario is our inability to agree on a cooperation model that will ensure success. Sometimes the clients insist that they just need the developers whom they will manage directly (outstaffing model). They don’t want a project manager on the itexus side to interfere with the work process and want to run things their way. While this model works well in some cases, and we have examples proving this, this usually requires real professional resources like a CTO and Project manager on the client’s end with experience of integrating remote developers into their team and a mature process. If a client’s development team doesn’t have such experience this usually leads to various problems. Our preferred model is to provide a service, not bodies. In this case we have a project manager our end supervising the project, knowing typical risks and managing this proactively. Even if problems happen, we can spot them early on and fix the problems with no impact on the client. Another typical source of problems is vague requirements. Sometimes we are forced to give a quick estimate of the project with vague high level requirements. When a project starts, a frequently encountered problem is that smaller details are assumed, but not explicitly mentioned in the requirements, which are interpreted differently by the development team. We always recommend doing a more detailed requirements analysis and documentation step + prototyping before starting the project. You may also review our references here – clutch.co/profile/itexus. Our clients left testimonials including positive & not so positive feedback on us.
What are the most important factors to make my project a success?
We can speak of project success from a software development perspective – delivering a high quality product on time and within a planned budget, assuming you let us manage the development process. From this perspective, we believe that the most important factor is good requirements work:
- Use our business analysts to help you analyze the requirements and define functionality of the products screen by screen.
- Pick the right scope for the MVP. Don’t spend time and budget on unnecessary features.
- Document the requirements before estimating and coding. Remember that the devil is in detail.
- Iterate fast, show intermediate results to the potential uses, and incorporate their feedback.
Of course the requirements will change, but the sooner the change is made the less expensive it is. Of course there is also the business side of things: go to market strategy, competition analysis, product strategy, revenue projections. But this is not exactly our area of expertise. We’ll happily share our opinion and experience, but those are business decisions that need to be made by professionals in those areas.
Let’s assume I want to hire Itexus. What are our next steps?
- Contact us and speak with our sales manager about your needs.
- Sign a NDA.
- We will analyze your requirements and organize a few workshops with our technical team to discuss the possible solutions.
- We come back with a free proposal containing.
- Specification of the requirements.
- UI/UX mockups.
- A Technical proposal with suggested architecture, technology stack and third party components.
- Detailed feature by feature cost estimate.
- You review our proposal, share your feedback, and the proposal is adjusted.
- Sign the contract.
- The project begins.
Can I get any testimonials from your previous clients?
Of course you may start by reviewing our profile and reviews on Clutch: https:/clutch.co/profile/itexus. The references there are verified by clutch, and as you can see, there are also not so positive references there too. These are mostly from our early days though, and we have learned from our mistkaes. We’ll happily provide contacts of our existing clients with whom you can speak before you accept our proposal.
I’m afraid to outsource my project. How do you manage the risks?
You have nothing to worry about. Our process is organized so that the clients’ risks are minimized:
- All work processes are transparent. We are available for communication every day. We deliver the results every two weeks. The client pays only for what he gets. If we don’t deliver, you don’t pay.
- We store all the source codes and executables in clients’ accounts in major cloud providers, such as Atlassian Bitbucket for source code or Amazon Web Services for the hosting of the product. In case of any problems, you will have all the materials used in your product’s development. We document all requirements, architecture and code so it is easily transferable to another team if needed.
- We thoroughly control the quality of the code and the product on our end and provide the reports, checklists, code reviews and automatic code quality analysis to the clients
- All intellectual property belongs to you, protected by the laws of your country.
- We are open to any independent audit of the code and product quality. It is a relatively low cost measure that can be used at any time. Even before the project starts you may want to ask for an independent opinion on the suggested architecture and other materials.
- Our goal is to build long term relationships. We have clients who have stayed with us for over 6 years, since the company was founded. If we run into any temporary issues we’ll solve them as partners, giving priority to long term relationships over short term profit.
What is included in the project estimation you provide?
After the project evaluation we provide a proposal with the cost of the development. It includes:
- planning;
- management (Project Manager is your primary point of contact during the development & delivery phases);
- analysis (Business Analyst works on the project on demand);
- design (if mentioned in the proposal you have received from us);
- development;
- QA;
- deployment.
All these services are included in the proposal. If the project requires any paid third-party integrations, the client pays for it additionally. Feel free to discuss the cost and services mentioned in the proposal with your project coordinator. We usually make advances to our clients.
I have tough deadlines. Could you speed up the development so I meet the launch date I need?
For sure. You can discuss it either with your Project Coordinator or a Project Manager. We always have available resources to extend the team working on the project and speed up the development.
Do you provide code refactoring service?
Yes. To save your money and time first we perform a code audit to define the issues to improve. After a careful evaluation we’ll prepare a proposal with the code parts to improve. We don’t refactor all the code, only the sensitive parts when the value is high to the project owner / stakeholder.
What do you need from me to be able to start (besides an agreement in place)?
When the agreement is signed from both sides and Itexus has received an agreed prepayment we proceed with the team formation (1 week usually) and a kick off meeting. So it takes from 1 to 2 weeks max to start. Nothing special from you is required, only a positive mindset and desire to move forward.
How much involvement will you need from me during the development stage?
We assign a Project Manager on every project we are working on. So he will be your primary point of contact. PM will send reports, hold demo calls, provide you with the project status, etc. He organises all the work on the project, monitors agreed deadlines, budget, workload, etc. From your side we need responsiveness and a desire to make a successful product.
I’m choosing between two development companies and considering whether it would be more beneficial to pick the one with a lower rate.
Selecting a software development company should not be based solely on price. While a 30% lower rate may seem appealing, it could result in spending 200% more hours on the same task. Beyond the rate, there are other important factors to consider, such as performance, work quality, and education, which can vary across different regions. Insufficient skills and experience can lead to project failure, low code quality, bugs, and hidden costs.
If you have a complex project where superior quality takes precedence over lower hourly rates, we invite you to engage in a discussion with us. Our team of developers is based in Europe and has received top-notch European education. They possess unparalleled expertise in handling intricate Fintech projects, and we believe our price-to-value ratio is highly competitive. You will have the opportunity to receive quotes from different companies and choose the best offer.
Furthermore, if you are already working with developers at lower rates, we recommend conducting a code audit to evaluate performance and quality. This will help you make a well-informed decision rather than solely relying on the hourly rate. If your current development team fails to meet your expectations and requirements, we offer project audits and rescue services to address any challenges you may encounter.
Reasons to Choose Itexus
Quality & Security
Security and quality are crucial to us and we are fully dedicated to securing business processes and delivering high-quality products.
Certified In-house Specialists
We have 90+ talented in-house specialists in different departments with proven achievements and certificates in the professional domains.
Workflow & Billing Transparency
Milestone tracking, regular reports and adherence to the best project management practices help us make the development, communication and billing flows transparent and clear.
Flexible Approach
We stick to an agile methodology that allows us to cope with some obstacles, decrease risks and satisfy clients’ expectations.
Trustworthy Company
Operating globally and providing software development services over 6 years we proved ourselves as a trustworthy company backed by our clients’ reviews on Clutch.
Extensive Startup Experience
We know all the nuances and can help our clients avoid many difficulties other startup owners face. We definitely know how to convert a rough idea into successful live product.
Clients’ Testimonials & Awards
