The arithmetic
Take a specialist’s contracted working hours across a full calendar year. Subtract Thai public holidays, their annual leave and an allowance for personal leave. Divide what remains by twelve.
That figure is the committed monthly capacity in your agreement, and the price attached to it. For a typical full-time developer it comes to around 160 hours a month. A team’s capacity is the sum of its members, and your proposal states the exact figure for each person and the total.
Scroll the table sideways to see every column.
| Team | Hours a month | Invoices a month |
|---|---|---|
| 1 person | Around 160 | 1 |
| 3 people | Around 480 | 1 |
| 5 people | Around 800 | 1 |
Why some months run over and some run under
A month with no public holidays delivers more than the committed average. April, with Songkran, delivers less. December and January land somewhere in between, depending on how leave falls. Over twelve months it evens out, because the commitment is a yearly average.
Scroll the table sideways to see every column.
| Month | Working days | Hours delivered | Invoice |
|---|---|---|---|
| A month with no public holidays | 22 | 176 | The monthly fee |
| April, with Songkran | 18 | 144 | The same monthly fee |
| The yearly average | 20 | 160 | The same monthly fee |
Your invoice is the same in every one of those months, and so is your forecast. Finance teams plan engineering cost a year ahead without a correction every quarter.
What counts as capacity
Capacity is time the team spends on your product: building, testing, reviewing, planning with your team and joining your ceremonies. It’s tracked in our system and reported to you every month, so you can see delivered hours against the commitment.
Delivery management, training, coaching, the office, equipment and HR sit around that capacity. They’re part of the same monthly fee, and none of them appears as a separate line on the invoice.
How leave and absences are handled
Planned leave is already in the arithmetic, so it doesn’t change the fee. Leave is known in advance, and sprints are planned around it, so it never comes as a surprise.
Longer absences are a conversation with one named person. Your service delivery manager tells you as early as possible, so you can re-plan the affected sprints. If a team member leaves for good, we recruit and onboard the replacement under the same agreement.
What a fixed fee gives you
Because you pay for a committed monthly capacity, the fee doesn’t change when one month has fewer working days than the next. With a dedicated development team for hire you don’t audit a timesheet the way you would with an hourly contractor. A short month doesn’t start a discussion either.
It also changes what you talk about. With hourly billing, every hour is a cost to keep down. With a committed capacity, you talk about how to use the team’s time best.
Raising or lowering the commitment
You get a capacity report every month. When the work needs more, you can add hours or a new skill under the same agreement. A dedicated development team usually starts small and grows this way, one role at a time. It’s also how companies hire dedicated developers through us.
How this compares with hourly billing
With plain staff augmentation or offshore staffing you’d usually pay by the hour, track the hours yourself and see a different invoice every month. A fixed monthly capacity is part of what makes the service managed. You get one figure, the same every month, for the people and everything we do around them.
