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Hourly billing was not the core problem for AnyPlace founder Shruti Mehta; the problem was delivery that clients could not readily inspect, scope that stayed open-ended, and technical decisions that were difficult to challenge. Her alternative is a four-part operating policy: demonstrate working software every seven days, define scope and milestones up front, put code and cloud accounts under client control, and explain architectural trade-offs plainly.
Mehta says she used this approach across “50+ builds,” but the figure is self-reported and comes without a measurement method or comparison. Treat the rules as her experience and a practical framework to evaluate—not proof that milestone work is always better than hourly billing. Read Mehta’s article on DEV Community (displayed September 18, 2026).
Why replace hourly retainers with delivery rules?
A billing model alone does not guarantee useful progress. A team can bill by the hour and communicate well, or quote a fixed milestone and still leave a client unsure what is finished, what has changed, or who controls the work. Mehta’s proposal is therefore broader than changing the invoice: it ties visible delivery to defined scope, client custody of project assets, and candid technical advice.
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Rule 1: Deliver working software to the client’s repository every seven days
Mehta describes tested pull requests merged into a client-owned private repository, followed by a live demonstration of functionality against acceptance criteria. The seven-day interval is a delivery checkpoint in her approach—not a universal guarantee that every project can produce a complete feature each week.
This cadence gives the client something more concrete to assess than status reports. A demo can reveal whether a feature behaves as agreed, while the merged code gives the client a durable artifact to inspect. Small, frequent deliveries also limit how much unreleased work accumulates before anyone can see it.
Make the checkpoint inspectable
- Agree on acceptance criteria before the work begins, so the demo has a clear reference point.
- Review a working slice of the product, not just slides or a verbal progress update.
- Keep the code in the client’s repository and make the merged changes available for review.
- Record what is complete, what remains, and any decision or dependency that could affect the next checkpoint.
Rule 2: Define scope and milestones instead of leaving work open-ended
Mehta recommends a one-to-two-week discovery phase to map data flows, authentication boundaries, and third-party dependencies. The output should be an architectural specification and a set of milestones that explain what the project includes. That initial work is intended to make estimates and decisions more grounded; it cannot remove uncertainty from software development.
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What to clarify before committing
- Which user-visible outcomes and acceptance criteria belong to each milestone.
- Which integrations, data flows, and authentication boundaries are in scope.
- What assumptions or third-party dependencies could change the plan.
- How a change request is assessed, approved, and reflected in the schedule or price.
- What is deliberately out of scope, so a later addition is recognized as a decision rather than a misunderstanding.
Rule 3: Keep code, accounts, and handover materials in the client’s custody
Mehta’s policy is to build in a GitHub or GitLab organization belonging to the client and provision cloud environments in accounts that the client owns. The principle is custody: the business should not need a vendor’s personal or company-controlled account to access its code or essential infrastructure.
Ownership of an account is only useful if the client can understand and operate what is in it. Mehta names CI/CD pipelines, architecture READMEs, environment-variable dictionaries, and seed scripts as handover materials. The specific contents should fit the project, but the handover should make it possible for another qualified team to orient itself and continue the work.
Check access and handover
- Confirm who owns the source-code organization and who has administrative access.
- Confirm that production and other cloud environments are provisioned under client-controlled accounts.
- Document deployment steps, architecture, required configuration, and seed data where applicable.
- Agree how credentials and access are transferred securely; documentation should describe required variables without exposing secret values.
- Make handover part of the delivery plan rather than leaving it until the relationship ends.
Rule 4: Be candid when architecture is more complex than the problem requires
Mehta argues that engineers should explain when a proposed architecture may impose more operational or maintenance cost than the requirements justify. She uses Kubernetes and a custom fine-tuned large language model as examples of choices that should be questioned, not as technologies that are inherently unsuitable.
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Ask for the trade-off, not just the technology name
- What requirement does the proposed component satisfy?
- What new operational work, failure modes, or specialist knowledge does it add?
- What simpler option was considered, and where would it stop being sufficient?
- What evidence or future condition would justify revisiting the decision?
How the approach differs from hourly time-and-materials
Neither contract form answers every delivery question by itself. Hourly time-and-materials charges for time spent, while fixed-scope or milestone work commits to defined outputs and requires a way to handle changes. The four rules add expectations about demonstrations, repository and account control, and technical advice that should be made explicit under either model.
| Decision area | Hourly time-and-materials | Fixed scope or milestone work |
|---|---|---|
| Scope changes | Time spent on additional work is billed; the client still needs visibility into priorities and authorization. | Changes should be approved as explicit trade-offs or added milestones, as Mehta recommends. |
| Progress evidence | Billing time does not itself specify how often working software is demonstrated. | Milestones can define review points; Mehta’s approach adds a seven-day working-software checkpoint. |
| Repository and cloud control | The billing model does not determine who owns code repositories or infrastructure accounts. | Mehta’s policy puts both in client-controlled accounts from the beginning. |
| Handover | Must be agreed separately; hourly billing alone does not define deliverables. | Can be specified alongside milestones, including operational documentation and build materials. |
| Estimation and change risk | The client pays for time used, so total cost may vary with effort. | The team must estimate defined work; new requirements need a change decision rather than being treated as automatically included. |
Mehta advocates the latter approach, but her account does not establish that it is best for every project. Work with uncertain requirements may benefit from a discovery or time-and-materials phase before a fixed commitment; whichever model is chosen, clients should understand how progress, approvals, and account access will work.
What the reported results do—and do not—show
Mehta says the practices transformed delivery velocity and client trust across “50+ builds.” That is her reported experience, not an independently verified result. The article provides no definition of velocity, before-and-after measurements, comparison group, or independent corroboration, so the figure should not be treated as evidence of a guaranteed outcome for other teams.
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