San Francisco has more developers than any city in the country. Finding a good one is still hard.
SF founders have access to the world's deepest developer talent pool. They also have access to the world's most expensive agency overhead, the most over-engineered technical proposals, and the most investor-oriented architecture decisions that don't ship on time. RCB Software delivers what SF founders actually need: production software, fixed price, no infrastructure theatre.
You're a San Francisco-area founder who needs your product built. You've seen the local agency quotes and they're aimed at Series A budgets. You need a senior developer who operates at founder-stage economics.
San Francisco's developer market produces two extremes that are both expensive in different ways: the venture-backed agency that charges $300/hour and builds for eventual acqui-hire rather than for your specific product requirements; and the contractor ecosystem where well-qualified developers are available for $150–$200/hour with no fixed-price accountability and no defined deliverable.
The SF startup context has a specific dynamic that makes the agency model particularly misaligned: the average pre-seed founder is not yet paying themselves, is working from a WeWork or a home office, and needs a production-quality MVP that doesn't burn through their seed round. The average SF agency is designed for clients with seven-figure technical budgets, dedicated project managers, and the timeline flexibility that comes with institutional backing.
The specific SF over-engineering problem: development shops in SF are staffed by developers who came from FAANG companies and bring FAANG-scale architecture assumptions to every project. Kubernetes for an MVP with 50 users. Microservices architecture for a product that hasn't found product-market fit. Event sourcing and CQRS for a booking system that processes 30 transactions a day. The architecture decisions are impressive in a technical presentation and terrible for shipping a product in 12 weeks.
A production web application or mobile platform built for a San Francisco-area founder at the economics of a senior freelancer with the accountability of a fixed-price contract.
Pre-seed and seed MVPs
The minimum viable version of your product, built with the architecture that scales post-PMF but doesn't require a DevOps team to operate pre-PMF. Next.js, Postgres, Clerk, Stripe — the stack that covers most product requirements without infrastructure complexity.
SaaS products for the B2B market
San Francisco has the world's densest concentration of B2B SaaS buyers. Applications that serve the SF tech ecosystem: tools for remote teams, developer productivity tools, operations software for tech companies.
Consumer applications
SF consumer startups in fintech, health and wellness, social, and productivity. React Native mobile apps and Next.js web applications.
Internal tools for SF tech companies
Operational tools for growing tech companies that have outgrown Notion and Airtable — custom dashboards, data pipelines, admin tools, and reporting systems.
One honest number to start.
Fixed-scope, fixed-price. The number below is the starting point — final scope is built from your brief.
A production web application or mobile platform built for a San Francisco-area founder at the economics of a senior freelancer with the accountability of a fixed-price contract.
Three steps, every time.
The same repeatable engagement on every project. No surprises, no mystery, no billable ambiguity.
Brief & discovery.
We send you questions, then get on a call. Output: a written scope with every step, feature, and integration listed.
Build & ship.
Fixed schedule, weekly reviews. No scope creep unless you change the scope — and if you do, we reprice it transparently.
Warranty & retainer.
30-day warranty on every launch. Most clients stay on a monthly retainer for ongoing features and maintenance.
Why Fixed-Price Matters Here
SF founders who've been through the agency hourly billing experience — and most have — understand the value of fixed price immediately. No runway uncertainty from open-ended billing.
Related engagements.
Questions, answered.
The comparison point is a senior software engineer at a Series B company — someone who has shipped production applications, understands trade-offs, and makes architecture decisions based on the product requirements rather than the resume value of the technology choice. That's the quality bar. Reviews of delivered work are available from previous clients.
Yes — HIPAA compliance for digital health applications and the architectural patterns for fintech products (data handling, audit logging, encryption at rest) are standard scope additions. SF has significant concentrations of both.
The specification process is designed for this. A scoping call identifies the core hypothesis and the minimum feature set that tests it. The spec documents what's being built and what's explicitly not in scope. If the founder wants to change requirements post-spec, the change is evaluated and priced before it's implemented. The fixed-price model requires defined scope, which is actually useful for founders who are still refining what they're building — the spec process forces the decisions that need to be made before development anyway.
Same as everywhere — location doesn't change the price. Web applications from $25k, mobile platforms from $45k, websites from $8k. All fixed-price.
Yes — architecture documentation, codebase review summary, and technical diligence preparation are post-launch engagement types. SF investors conduct technical due diligence earlier and more rigorously than most markets.
Tell Ryel about your project.
Describe what you’re building and what outcome you need. You’ll have a written, fixed-price scope within the week.