CHAPTER04FREQUENT QUESTIONS
Questions we get a lot.
Do you sign NDAs before the first call?
Yes — happily. Send yours, or we'll send ours. We've kept commercial details of every HK engagement private since 2014; the case studies on this site are published with explicit client permission, and many of our clients prefer to stay off-record.
What does a typical engagement look like?
A free 45-minute discovery call → a short written plan (1 page, not 30) → a fixed-price audit or a time-boxed first sprint → an ongoing shape (retainer, squad, or embedded). Most clients we still work with today started with a HK$45K audit or a 6-week build.
Will my data leave Hong Kong?
Only with your explicit say-so. We default to Hong Kong / Singapore regions on AWS, GCP, and Azure, and to locally-hosted Postgres for AI projects with sensitive documents. For regulated clients (financial advisors, healthcare) we will run open-weights models on dedicated infrastructure rather than send anything to a third-party LLM.
Who owns the code?
You do, from day one. Repository under your GitHub organisation, infrastructure under your cloud account. We've never held a client's code hostage and we never will — if a relationship ends, the hand-over is what we are most proud of.
Can you work with our existing developers?
Often that's the best shape. We frequently sit alongside an in-house team — sometimes filling a senior gap, sometimes accelerating a single workstream, sometimes mentoring a junior team into the next tier. We don't do politics, and we make sure your team gets the credit.