Studio sprint.
Or agency project.

The pricing and communication model. Amatrix Studio operates on fixed-price async sprints — total cost agreed in writing before work starts, no calls, source files on delivery. Traditional agencies operate on hourly billing or T&M with synchronous meetings, weekly standups, and retainers. The same SaaS product costs $99,995 at Amatrix Studio (fixed) versus $150,000–$400,000 at a traditional agency (hourly).

Three structural reasons. First, async delivery removes meeting overhead, freeing engineers to ship code instead of attending calls. Second, fixed-price contracts force the studio to scope work tightly up-front, eliminating the multi-week discovery billable at hourly rates. Third, the studio operates without account managers, project managers, or sales engineers — overhead a traditional agency builds into every hourly rate.

Sometimes. Enterprises with a defined deliverable, an internal PM, and the ability to send written specs are an excellent fit — they save 40–60% versus a traditional agency. Enterprises that need a vendor to do their procurement, attend their meetings, or absorb open-ended scope are a poor fit and should hire a traditional agency.

Most sprints map cleanly to a phase a traditional agency would bill. The Ideation Sprint ($4,995, 1 week) replaces a $15,000–$30,000 discovery phase. The HTML Demo ($9,995, 3–4 weeks) replaces a $20,000–$50,000 design+prototype phase. The Full Stack Sprint ($99,995, 12–16 weeks) replaces the entire $150,000–$400,000 build engagement. Each replacement saves 50–75% with comparable or better deliverables.

Yes — three things. First, you don't get an account manager or weekly check-in calls (which is a feature for some, a loss for others). Second, you don't get embedded learning — your team won't sit in design reviews and absorb context the way they would in a traditional engagement. Third, sprint tiers are scope-limited; if your scope is genuinely open-ended R&D, fixed-price doesn't fit and you should hire a traditional agency on hourly.

Yes. The most common entry point is a one-week Ideation Sprint that converts the agency's open-ended work into defined sprint tiers. Many founders make the switch after 6–9 months of an agency engagement that has burned half the budget without producing shippable software. The studio's typical first response is to absorb the existing context and produce a fixed-price plan to ship the remainder.

No retainers. The studio is sprint-only by design — every engagement has a defined end. Post-sprint maintenance is handled in two ways: clients receive complete source files on delivery and can maintain in-house, or they can engage future sprints (e.g., feature additions) as discrete fixed-price contracts. There is no monthly retainer model and no plan to introduce one.