How we work
What you're buying, and how it goes.
Who does the work, the place of AI, what stays in your name, how we get to a figure. Every point on this page can be checked.
Who does the work
The person advising you is the person doing the work.
The pattern is well known: a seasoned person sells, a less seasoned one does the work, and the client discovers the gap at delivery. Here there’s no such gap: what we advise you to do, we know how to do, because we have already done it.
Years of practice behind us. Seniority is worth nothing on its own; what it produces, on the other hand, can be observed:
- recognising a false problem before we have billed three days on it
- anticipating what breaks (migrations, redirects, email deliverability, version upgrades) because we have already seen it break
- knowing how to say no to a request that will cost a lot for nothing
- not learning our trade at your expense: what we invoice, we already know how to do
- building foundations that accept what comes next: when a new need arrives, a piece is added to the existing base, and nothing is started again from zero
- explaining what’s happening in your language, without hiding behind technical jargon
We recognise a false problem.
Some requests are not worth building. We say so beforehand, not after three billed days.
We know what breaks.
Migrations, redirects, email deliverability, version upgrades: the traps are known because we have already hit them.
We choose Europe.
European hosting by default, European tools proposed first at every decision point.
We speak your language.
No technical jargon: every decision is explained plainly, with what it changes and what it costs. You understand what you're buying, and what you're turning down.
A web agency?
Why we don't present ourselves as an agency.
The word is set aside deliberately. It’s not a dig: communications firms are partners and clients, and their trade isn’t ours. A web agency, in common usage, sits close to a communications agency: it carries your image and your message, it does graphic design. Our speciality is elsewhere, on the technical side: the foundations, the tools, what gets built and maintained over time. We keep an overall view of your project, but it’s on that part that we act.
The term we keep: digital partner.
The method
What matters is not the technology.
Code has become the cheapest and least risky part of a project. What’s expensive is building the wrong thing, or building it the wrong way round. So what we invoice is the right decision, not lines of code.
What matters is the specification: what’s to be achieved, for whom, under what constraint. The language, the content management system, the structure follow from it, never the other way round. An accepted consequence: we have no favourite technology to push. An off-the-shelf content management system when it’s the right tool, bespoke work when it’s necessary, a no-code tool when that’s enough.
We resell no licences and we’re affiliated with no vendor. Nothing pushes us towards one solution rather than another except answering your need correctly.
AI
What we hand it, and what we don't.
We use AI in our production, and we say so. It replaces neither the thinking nor the decisions: it takes the repetitive work and gives us back time. The gain shows up in time and in the scope covered, not in a discount.
What we hand it: repetitive production, first test versions, surveying a poorly documented system we’re taking over, the back and forth of mockups that nobody used to invoice.
What we don’t hand it: the scoping, the trade-offs, the review of what comes out, and the responsibility for what’s delivered.
This isn’t a statement of intent: notabene, our tool published under a free licence, is built on exactly that principle. An agent applies corrections, a human validates every real change, and everything is logged.
We don’t sell cheaper AI. We sell the extra it lets us do.
Your autonomy
Our aim is not for you to need us.
Experience works for you, it doesn't lock you in. Six commitments, all verifiable.
Everything is in your name.
Domains, accounts and hosting are registered in your company name, never ours. You can take them back without us.
Everything is handed over.
Code delivered, data exportable, documentation written. What we produce doesn't stay with us.
Standard technology.
No in-house solution that only we would know how to maintain. Anyone can take over after us: that's the only guarantee worth having.
You stay in control where it matters.
Editing your content, managing your access, understanding your hosting bill. What you want to be able to do yourself is decided at design time.
We say so when there's nothing to do.
An audit concluding "what you have holds up, keep it" is a normal deliverable here, not a failure.
We publish nothing about you.
Not your name, not your infrastructure, not your tools, on any commercial material.
You stay because it suits you, not because you can’t leave.
Our limits
Our trade is a technical one.
We design, build, connect, secure and maintain. That's our ground, and we don't claim to cover others: doing them by halves would serve no one. For everything below we work with partners whose trade it's, and we put you in direct contact with them.
The network
When we call on someone else.
We call on partners when a job needs a skill we don't have, never to get work we can do ourselves done on the cheap. You always know who is working on what, and we remain responsible for the result. Two ways of calling on someone. They don't carry the same responsibility, or the same billing:
| Partner brought into an engagement | Introduction |
|---|---|
| A technical job calls for a complementary skill | The need belongs to a trade we don't practise |
| We lead; the partner works with us | You lead, directly with the partner |
| The responsibility for the result is ours | The responsibility is the partner's |
| It's in our quote | It's billed directly between you and them |
We do our best to make sure you leave with a name.
Money
How we get to a figure.
We don’t sell work from a catalogue. Every quote follows a scoping, because that’s the only way to give you an estimate that holds.
In practice, in this order:
- We talk. To understand where you stand. No figure comes out of it, and that’s normal: at that stage, a figure would be invented.
- We scope. What has to be done, in what order, for what budget, in writing. Depending on the size of the job, that scoping is itself a piece of work, and it’s then quoted separately.
- We price. The quote covers deliverables, not days. It binds us: it doesn’t move along the way, unless you change the scope, and that change is decided, not discovered on the invoice.
- We maintain. Maintenance is a monthly subscription, chosen and cancellable. Never a condition of the initial work.
Only one of our services escapes this sequence, and the same rule explains it: the audit of your site is the only one whose scope can be bounded in advance, by the number of pages examined. Its price is therefore published, and it’s ordered online at audit.z29k.fr.
We’re not the cheapest option, and that’s not what we’re trying to be.
Tell us about your project, or your problem.
Describe your situation in a few lines, however it comes to you. You get a first reading in writing: what we understand, what we would do, where to start. Not an automatic acknowledgement, and no sales follow-up: an answer you can use, even if it stops there.