For agencies
When an agency needs a subcontractor
Agencies rarely need a subcontractor because they cannot build. They need one because the work arrived at the wrong time, or because it needs a depth of Drupal that is not worth carrying on staff between projects.
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A tender you can win but not staff
Drupal is named in the requirement, the deadline is real, and hiring a specialist for one contract does not pay back before the contract ends.
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A team already committed
The project cannot wait for your next slot, and turning it down means the client asks somebody else next time as well.
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A codebase nobody on staff wrote
Inherited at handover, or won from another agency. Somebody has to read it before anyone can promise a client anything about it.
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One part that needs a specialist
A migration, an integration, performance, accessibility. The rest of the project is yours; this piece is not worth learning twice.
Which arrangement
Subcontracting, white-label, or a reserved team
Three different commercial shapes get called the same thing. What separates them is what you are buying and when you pay for it.
Project subcontracting
A defined piece of work at a fixed price: a module, a migration, an audit, a build. Scoped, quoted, delivered, finished. This page. It suits work that has edges.
White-label delivery
The same work, delivered as your agency to your client, with our name absent from everything the client sees. The commercial shape is similar; the confidentiality terms are the point.
A reserved team
Named engineers held by the month against your backlog, for when the roadmap is continuous rather than a project with a finish line.
Terms
Settled in writing before any work starts
Mutual NDA first
Signed before a client name, a requirement document or a repository changes hands, rather than after a proposal has been written.
Non-solicitation, both ways
An NDA covers information. It does not cover approaching your client or hiring your developer. Those are separate clauses and they run in both directions.
Source code assigned to you
Bespoke work ships with full source from the first commit, to you, and to your client if that is how you contract with them.
Warranty held by whoever signs
On a development project the warranty belongs to your agency, as the party contracting with us: one year as standard, extendable up to three, agreed before the work starts.
You decide who appears
We join a client call under your brand where that is useful, or never appear at all. The default is that we do not exist.
These are the questions we would ask in your position. Our answers are below, and any subcontractor worth signing should be able to answer them as directly.
Can we see the repository while the work is happening?
Yes, from the first commit rather than at handover. A subcontractor who shows you the code only at the end is asking you to carry a risk you cannot price.
Who is actually doing the work?
Named engineers, and you are told when that changes mid-engagement rather than discovering it later in the commit history.
Whose process do we use?
Yours. Your tracker, your branching model, your review gates, your release cadence. Asking an agency to adopt a subcontractor’s process is the wrong way round.
What happens if you disappear?
The code is in your repository, it follows Drupal coding standards, and the documentation is written for a developer who was not there. That is what makes us replaceable, and being replaceable is the property you should be buying.
How do we start without betting a client on it?
One contained piece of work: a module, an audit, a migration assessment. That is a cheap way to learn how somebody works before a deadline depends on it.
Questions
Questions agencies ask first
- How is this priced?
Per engagement, because a single module build and a migration programme are not the same arrangement. Fixed price once the scope has edges; the published bands are on the pricing page.
- Will our client ever know you exist?
Only if you decide they should. Where invisibility is a requirement rather than a preference, that is the white-label arrangement and the terms are stricter.
- Do you work with other agencies in our market?
We work with agencies who also sell Drupal. Non-solicitation runs both ways, and we do not approach your clients.
- Can you take over a project already in progress?
Usually, and it starts with reading what exists rather than with a start date. That assessment is a deliverable you keep, whether or not you continue with us.