The dev team your clients think you have.
Senior engineering delivered under your brand, on your Slack, in your GitHub. Retain the dev-heavy contracts you used to subcontract out or walk away from, and protect the margin that keeps your agency profitable.
Growth rate of agencies that outsource 40-60% of delivery versus pure in-house.
Agency margin on white-labeled dev work at our rates. Markup 2-3x to your client.
From partnership signing to first white-labeled client deliverable.
Your brand on the commits, the Slack handles, the reports, the demos.
You won a dev-heavy retainer. Now you have to staff it.
Your agency grew on design, SEO, content, or ads. Then a good client asked you to build something real: a custom portal, a Shopify app, a headless migration, an API integration, or an entire product. You said yes because you had to, and now you have three bad options.
You could hire a full-time senior engineer at $120K plus benefits. Six weeks to ramp, and the margin on a single client disappears the moment that client has a slow month. You could post on a freelance marketplace, watch the first three freelancers flake, and spend every Friday debugging the fourth one. Or you could use an offshore shop, watch the first sprint come back with good-looking screenshots and none of the features wired up, and watch your client churn. What you actually need is a senior US-based engineering team that hands you delivery-ready work, communicates like your own team, and stays invisible to the client. At a rate that leaves your margin intact.
Clients expect the bundle.
Web plus SEO plus automation plus AI plus social for the same retainer that used to buy two services. Subcontracting at 70-80% of what you bill your client turns every project into break-even. Subcontracting at 40-50% with real quality turns every project into 2-3x margin.
The tell your client spots.
Reddit agency owners cite it directly: the three worries with a white-label partner are quality, communication, and the client figuring out who actually did the work. Offshore shops fail all three. We are designed around all three.
The middle rung nobody talks about.
Your next hire is either a $120K senior engineer you cannot fully utilize, or a $40/hr contractor who needs a senior to babysit. White-label retainers are the middle rung: variable cost, senior quality, immediately on.
Onboard, brand, scope, deliver, renew.
Five phases from the first partner call to the monthly retainer cadence. No sales theater, no upfront fees. Your clients never know there are two agencies on the engagement.
Partnership onboarding. Week 1.
A 60-minute partner call covers your agency's stack preferences, client mix, communication style, and delivery cadence expectations. We sign a mutual NDA and a white-label master services agreement. You get a partner page on our internal wiki with your branding, your escalation contacts, and your pricing tiers. No fee for this onboarding.
Brand alignment. Your identity, our delivery.
We set up delivery infrastructure under your brand: your GitHub org access, your Slack workspace access, your email domain signatures, your-brand deliverable templates (weekly reports, sprint demo emails, scoping documents, runbooks). Your clients never see ScubaDev branding unless you choose to disclose.
Per-project scope. 48-hour turnaround.
You bring a client project. We scope it in 48 hours with a one-page plan: deliverables, timeline, resource allocation, fixed or retainer pricing. You mark it up, you sell it, you sign the contract with your client. We stay off the client contract entirely. Your agency is the prime contractor.
Inside your stack. Invisible to the client.
Your engineer works in your GitHub, posts in your Slack under your domain, and emails under your domain if client contact is required. Weekly reports go out from your brand. Sprint demos are led by you or we run them as your engineering team without naming ScubaDev. Your client believes we are your team because operationally we are.
Renew or expand. Most partners convert to retainer by month three.
Projects finish on schedule. The client renews with you. You either keep us on that account or roll us onto the next one. Retainer partners get priority on capacity. Project-based partners enter our queue when they have a project. Most partners start project-based and convert to retainer inside 90 days.
Your brand, our delivery, your margin.
Sixteen things every partnership includes. No surprises, no upcharges, no separate line items on the invoice.
Skip this solution if any of these are true.
You are a solo freelancer looking for subcontract dev capacity.The partner onboarding overhead does not amortize for one-off projects under $8k. Go direct through our Custom Business Apps or Startup Program instead.
You want us as the prime contractor on your client work.We stay behind you on the contract. If you want ScubaDev on the client contract, that is not a white-label engagement, it is a direct engagement.
You need to compete with us on dev services.Our exclusivity policy: we do not sign agencies whose primary marketed service is dev. Marketing, creative, SEO, social, content, CRM, ads all fine. Full-stack dev agency is not.
You want offshore pricing.We are US-based senior engineers. Our rate card reflects that. If the economics of your client work require offshore rates, offshore is the right vendor for that engagement.
You are not ready to sign a mutual NDA and MSA up front.The white-label partnership cannot function without paperwork. If paperwork is the blocker, we cannot help you.
Your clients are in regulated industries we do not serve.We do not currently take defense, gambling, or adult-industry clients under white-label engagements. Call us if you need to check a specific vertical.
Two ways to partner. One way to scale.
Pay as your clients sign
Minimum 2-week scope. Flat per-project rate so you can mark up cleanly. Book projects as they come. No ongoing obligation between engagements.
- Flat per-project rate, no hourly surprises
- Mark up 2-3x to your client
- 48-hour scoping turnaround
- Same brand-masked delivery model
- Convert to retainer anytime
Dedicated seats, priority queue
One engineer per seat. Volume discounts at 3+ seats ($6,995) and 6+ seats ($6,495). Annual rate lock available if you sign by March 31.
- Dedicated engineer allocation per seat
- Priority queue, reserved capacity
- Volume discounts at 3+ and 6+ seats
- Monthly partner touchpoint call
- Annual rate lock option
- First access to new solutions
Named pods, reserved capacity
For agencies running multiple dev-heavy retainers in parallel. Reserved capacity, named engineer pods, optional vertical exclusivity written into the agreement.
- Named engineer pod per partner
- Optional vertical exclusivity clause
- $6,495 per seat, rate-locked
- Co-selling resources and case studies
- Quarterly strategic review
Six ways clients figure out their agency uses a subcontractor. We close every one.
Reddit agency threads, Slack communities, and our own partner postmortems converge on the same handful of tells. Here is the honest list and how we neutralize each.
Email domain mismatch
Engineer emails from @scubadev.com on a thread where everyone else is @youragency.com. Client spots it in seconds.
GitHub commit attribution
Client requests code access, pulls the repo, and sees commits attributed to @contractor-so-and-so from a company they do not recognize.
Slack handle and workspace
Client gets added to a shared Slack channel and sees members from three different workspaces. Their own, yours, and ours.
Zoom background and bio
Engineer shows up to the sprint demo with a ScubaDev virtual background or a LinkedIn title that reads Senior Engineer at ScubaDev.
Report and deliverable templates
Weekly report arrives in a PDF that does not match the rest of the agency's design system. Client notices the footer disclaimer.
Voice, vocabulary, and cadence
Engineer uses different project-management vocabulary, a different meeting cadence, or different technical idioms than the rest of the agency's team.
How do you keep the client from figuring out we are using a subcontractor?
Do we have to disclose to our client that you are a subcontractor?
Can you meet with our clients directly?
What stacks do you work in?
What happens if a project goes sideways?
Do you sign non-compete agreements?
Can we resell your other solutions under our brand?
What are your terms and how do we exit?
What a white-label partnership looks like in practice.
Three anonymized partnership archetypes. Details changed where partners requested it. Replace with real named partners once we have written consent in hand.
Regional home services, custom booking portal
Client needed a custom booking portal the agency could not staff. We scoped, built, and launched in 9 weeks. Portal is in production over a year later. Agency retains the full retainer. End client never asked who built it.
DTC skincare brand, Shopify + subscription app
Studio handled brand and design. We handled Shopify custom app, checkout extension, and subscription portal. Studio tripled the project margin versus their usual freelance-marketplace approach. Renewed for a second engagement the next quarter.
Three concurrent retainers, reserved capacity
Reserved capacity eliminated the "we just won a project and cannot staff it" scramble. Agency principal reports higher win rate on dev-heavy pitches because sales can commit to realistic timelines with confidence.
Stop saying no to dev work.
Book a 45-minute partner call with Nick. We walk through your client mix, your typical project scope, and whether a white-label partnership makes the math work for your agency. If it does not, we will tell you. If it does, you leave the call with a scoping template and a path to your first white-labeled project inside 10 days.
No partnership fee. No retainer to get a scope on your first project. No 47-slide deck.
FROM OUR IDEAS LIBRARY
