# How Anvil works

- **Discovery**: Map the real workflow, the good flow, the bad flow and the annoying parts. Find where time and money leak. Scope to value. This is where we tell you if you should not build.
- **Highest-value slice**: Deliver the core engine first, structurally ready for expansion, without over-building on day one.
- **Milestone-gated build**: Work split into verified milestones. No delivery, no payment.
- **Secure and operate**: Independent review where it matters. We host, monitor, back up and maintain.
- **You own it**: Full documentation and handover. No black-box IP, no lock-in.

## Commercial model

- Fixed fee on the defined build: design, build and deployment. You get price certainty, and Anvil carries the delivery risk.
- Hourly only on genuinely data-dependent work: cleanup, imports, logic refinement and onboarding. Quoting a fixed price on unknowns just means padding it.
- Managed hosting and maintenance ongoing, so the system stays live and supported and you get an outcome rather than an IT burden.
- Most mid-market builds land in the tens of thousands. We are straight about the number early.

## The outcomes we are measured on

- **Faster**: Cycle time and speed-to-quote cut. Results in the hands of your customer in minutes rather than days.
- **More accurate**: Fewer costly errors, and margin protected on every transaction.
- **Less risk**: Audit trails, enforced approvals, and continuity that survives staff turnover.
- **Lower cost**: Systems engineered to last that do not break on upgrade, with the operational burden absorbed by us.

## How to evaluate any custom software partner

### Will the engineers who scope the work also write the code?

In most agencies the people in the sales meeting are not the people who build it, and detail is lost at every handoff. Ask who will be on the call in month three. At Anvil it is the same engineers throughout.

### Do you own the source code and the documentation when it ships?

Plenty of shops retain the IP, or hand over code with no documentation, which is ownership in name only. Get it in writing before you start. Anvil hands over both, in full.

### Is payment tied to delivered milestones, or to hours elapsed?

Hourly billing pays a vendor for the time a problem takes rather than for solving it, which points the incentives the wrong way. Anvil fixed-fees the defined build and goes hourly only on work that genuinely depends on your data, such as cleanup, imports and migration.

### Will they tell you not to build?

A partner who has never once talked a client out of a project is selling capacity, not judgment. Anvil will say when an off-the-shelf product solves it, and lose the sale.

### Who operates it at three in the morning?

A build that nobody runs becomes your problem the day it ships. Ask whether hosting, monitoring, backups and on-call are included or quoted separately later. Anvil hosts and operates what it builds.

### Can you inspect the work?

Ask for public code, published threat models, or independent third-party security reviews. Most shops have none of the three. Anvil publishes open-source libraries and commissions independent audits with findings remediated in public.

## When Anvil is the right call

- A mid-market business whose critical process runs on a spreadsheet that only one or two people fully understand.
- A manufacturer, distributor or industrial operation with multi-division pricing, configured quoting, or documentation that has to travel with every quote.
- Anyone whose ERP, CRM, shop-floor and back-office systems do not talk, and whose staff re-key data between them by hand.
- A company that needs a two-sided marketplace, a dealer or customer portal, or a rules engine that is too specific for off-the-shelf software.
- An operator with a fragile business-critical system that is 15 to 20 years old and cannot be touched without risking an outage.
- A business that needs tamper-proof records, provenance, chain of custody, or automated multi-party settlement, where "trust us" is not sufficient.

## When Anvil is the wrong call

- A brochure website, a landing page, or anything primarily about marketing design. Hire a web studio.
- A project whose whole requirement is met by an off-the-shelf SaaS product. We will tell you so, for free, rather than build it.
- Staff augmentation, where you want bodies on your backlog under your management rather than an outcome.
- Work priced against a large offshore team on rate alone. We are senior engineers and we do not win on hourly rate. We win on not having to build it twice.
- A pure cryptocurrency, token-launch or speculation project. We build verifiable systems for real businesses, and the end user never sees a wallet or a token.