For founders who shipped it themselves and now need it to actually work.
Under three grand a month gets you a real dev team cleaning up your vibe-coded prototype, shipping real features every two weeks, and getting you ready for the commercial tier once revenue supports it.
Active startup seats. Capped on purpose. When they fill, you wait.
From contract to first shipped feature. No onboarding tax.
Half the commercial tier. Same engineers. Same process.
Graduation runway. Then you move up or move on.
You shipped a working thing. The thing works until it doesn't.
You got further than most. You built a landing page, wired up auth, hooked Stripe, and pushed a prototype to production using Cursor, Replit, Lovable, Bubble, or some stack of AI coding tools that honestly nobody had a name for eighteen months ago. You have users. You have a handful of paying customers. You have signal.
You also have no idea how the auth flow actually works. You shipped a payment bug last week that took six hours to diagnose because the AI wrote tests that tested the wrong thing. You cannot add the next feature without breaking two existing ones. Every time you open Cursor you lose another afternoon to prompt iteration. You do not need a fractional CTO to draw architecture on a whiteboard. You do not need Upwork roulette. You need the same team that would build this for a funded Series A, at a price that makes sense when you are pre-revenue or barely past it.
The tech debt everyone warned you about.
You wrote 12,000 lines of AI-generated code in three months. No tests. No docs. No one besides you has ever opened the repo. Every new feature is three times slower than the last. Industry estimates say cleanup runs $50K to $500K. You have neither.
Priced out of the real agencies.
The good subscription dev teams start at $10K to $15K per month. You pulled a 200K seed or you are bootstrapping off product revenue. You cannot justify it even though you know it would work. So you keep duct-taping.
Burned by freelancers already.
You tried Upwork. The first one ghosted after two weeks. The second one wrote code that broke the first one's code. The third one wanted to rewrite the whole stack in Rails. You stopped before you tried a fourth.
Apply, Audit, Plan, Ship, Graduate.
Five phases from the first application read to the month-six graduation call. No sales theater, no discovery-call roulette. Real dev work, real shipped features, real choices at the end.
Two pages. We read every one.
What you built, how you built it, what revenue looks like, where you need to be in six months. If we have a seat open, we book a 30-minute call within 48 hours. If we do not, we tell you where you are on the waitlist. No 40-minute discovery calls dressed up as sales calls.
$500 codebase audit. Honest diagnosis.
We clone your repo, read every file, and produce a 10-page honest diagnosis: what is broken, what is fine, what needs a rewrite, what is worth saving. Written to be useful even if you do not hire us. If you do hire us, the $500 credits toward month one.
12 weeks mapped into six 2-week sprints.
Not a Gantt chart. A list of real features, real bug fixes, real refactors, ranked by what moves your revenue. You see the plan before sprint one starts. If month six ends with features still in the backlog, we already told you which ones.
Biweekly sprints. Friday demos. Real features every two weeks.
The same engineers, the same process, the same GitHub workflow, the same CI/CD as our commercial clients. We do not assign a junior because you are paying less. Every Friday of an end-of-sprint week: a demo, a written report, and the next sprint's scope.
Move up, move to maintenance, or move on.
At month six you either upgrade to the commercial tier (Starter at $5,995 or Momentum at $10,995), move to App Upkeep for maintenance, or take everything you own and exit cleanly. 20% off month one of Starter if you upgrade. No exit fee if you do not.
Everything the commercial tier has, at startup volume.
Same bench. Same runbooks. Same guardrails. Lower monthly hours and a single active workstream, scoped to the reality of pre-seed and seed budgets.
Skip this tier if any of these are not true for you.
You have no users yet.The Startup Program is for founders with a working prototype and some paying or retained users.
You need SOC 2, HIPAA, or financial-services compliance from day one.That work belongs at the Momentum or Deep End tier.
You need parallel workstreams.One active feature at a time is a hard constraint of this tier.
You want a co-founder relationship.We are a vendor. A very good one. Not a co-founder.
You want someone to tell you what to build.Product direction and customer intuition are yours. We build it right.
You need it in under seven days.We are waitlisted. If you have a seat, the first sprint starts inside two weeks.
One tier. One price. Capped at five seats.
Startup Program
A real dev team for funded founders at under three grand a month. 3-month minimum, capped at 5 active seats, 6-month graduation runway.
- 3-month minimum commitment
- 1 active workstream at a time
- 40 engineering hours per month
- Full ScubaDev process, no shortcuts
- Direct Slack with your engineer
- $500 audit credits back on signing
At the six-month mark, three doors open.
Graduate to Starter or Momentum
$5,995 or $10,995 per month. 20% off month one. Same engineers, more hours, parallel workstreams, and the full commercial guardrails layer. You stay where your codebase already lives.
Move to App Upkeep
Monitoring, security patches, small changes, and dependency upgrades. Keeps your product alive without the full build tier. Hourly rate with a small monthly floor. Pause any time.
Take it and exit cleanly
Full code, documentation, runbooks, and deployment access. No exit fee. We made what you shipped, shippable. What you do with it next is yours.
How is this different from an Upwork freelancer at $30/hour?
I got into Y Combinator. Can I use YC credits or SAFE structures?
Do you work with bootstrappers or only funded founders?
What happens at the 6-month deadline if I'm not ready to upgrade?
Will you rebuild my vibe-coded app from scratch?
Who actually writes the code? Offshore? Claude? Junior engineers?
Can I pause the subscription?
Do you sign NDAs?
We built our own stack before we built yours.
Every ScubaDev engineer who ships your product has shipped one of ours. The same process, the same sprint rhythm, the same guardrails, applied to real products with real revenue.
From prototype to production marketplace
We bootstrapped Yo-Ho.co from a spreadsheet idea to a dual-sided API marketplace with Stripe Connect and smart routing. Same process we run for Startup Program clients.
From landing page to live booking system
Landing page, demo system, Retell AI integration, and onboarding flow all shipped on the same two-week sprint cadence Startup Program clients get.
From hack day to revenue
16 parallel API collectors generating AI-grounded business audits for about $1.75 per complete run. Same bench that staffs Startup Program engagements.
Three-month commitment. One real dev team.
Apply in under five minutes. We read every application. If we have a seat, you hear back inside 48 hours with a time for a 30-minute call. If we are full, you go on the waitlist and we tell you where you stand.
No sales calls dressed up as discovery calls. No gated pricing you only see after giving up your email. What you see on this page is what you get.
FROM OUR IDEAS LIBRARY
