You keep the relationship. We do the part you'd subcontract.

You cannot bill for this. The work is donated by individual volunteers. There is no entity to subcontract to, no invoice, nothing to mark up. If you want cheap engineering capacity to resell, this is not it.

What is on offer is narrower, and for some firms still worth a lot:

• You stop saying “we can't do that” to a client you want to keep.
• A client gets unblocked on something technical without you hiring for it or eating the cost.
• You keep the relationship, the strategy, and the account. We are engineers and want none of it.

We work with the end organization directly, with you in the room and in the loop. Not cut out. Also not resold.

• A client asked for something outside your stack. Data engineering, an integration between two systems that were never meant to speak, a pile of documents nobody has the hours to read.
• You built a tool once and cannot maintain it. It works, a client depends on it, and nobody on staff will touch it. Sometimes the useful contribution is hardening it and writing it down.
• The same problem across several clients. The best case by far. If four of your organizations need the same thing, building it once and open sourcing it helps all of them and the next firm too.

That last one is worth a conversation even with no specific project today. You see patterns across accounts that nobody else in this ecosystem can see.

• Be straight with your client about what we are. Uncompensated volunteers, no contract, no guarantee, not your vendor.
• The client owns the infrastructure and the code. Not you, not us. Not negotiable, and it protects all three of us.
• Introduce us to whoever can answer questions. A relay through account management is how these stall.
• Progressive-aligned clients only.