Software costs almost nothing to build now. A working demo takes a weekend.
Then it breaks. The fixes and the upkeep come to you. Someone has to watch the security side. The technical debt the first version took on starts costing real money.
The standard advice is still to build it yourself and carry the risk yourself. I started Bilo Labs on that sentence being wrong.
I gave up hourly billing on purpose
Most custom software is billed by the hour or by the project. The invoice grows when the work grows, which puts the client on the wrong side of the deal. A slower build pays better.
So I stopped quoting it. My build fee is $0. You pay nothing while the work happens. The subscription starts the day a written acceptance test passes, and that test is a list of pass or fail tasks we agree and sign before I start coding. Not when the build is done.
I own the software
This is the part people push back on. I own the software. I may sell it to other businesses in your industry, including your competitors.
Your build is free because other companies pay for the same product. That is what makes a $0 build possible. One build, paid for by a whole industry.
You still get to leave. Cancel at the end of any month and your data comes out within 7 days, as CSV or JSON. I delete it 90 days after that.
What the monthly fee buys
The code is working by the time you pay anything. The fee buys what happens after that: one owner responsible for keeping it running.
Three you can hold me to:
- A named security review before launch.
- Breach notification within a stated number of hours.
- An uptime commitment.
The numbers get set per client, in the contract. The docs rule is simpler: every feature explained in writing, so a person with no software training can run the acceptance test on the docs alone.
I carry the risk now. When it breaks, fixing it is mine, because my income depends on it staying up.
Who this is for
Three things have to be true before I take a build:
- Your industry holds a few hundred similar businesses.
- The problem shows up across those businesses, not just yours.
- You accept that I own the software and may resell it.
If your code is your competitive edge, I am the wrong fit. (If your software is your moat, handing it to the guy who sells it to your rivals is a strange way to defend a moat.)
The first client in an industry always pays less than the standard price for that industry. That’s the benefit of giving us a shot.
Custom software. $0 to build. Pay monthly, only after it works. The full terms are on bilolabs.com/terms.