Here is what a time-billing engagement actually optimizes for: hours worked. Not features shipped. Not bugs fixed. Not user retention improved. Hours. When a development agency bills by the hour, the unit of value they're selling is their team's time — which means every hour of meetings, every revision cycle, every alignment call, every back-and-forth over specs is not friction to be eliminated. It's revenue. The incentive structure of traditional development billing is, at its core, in tension with the interests of the client. We built The DaaS Labs on the belief that this doesn't have to be the model. That the right way to structure a development partnership is around outcomes — shipped features, solved problems, measurable product progress — not around the clock.
What Happens When You Buy Time
When you engage a time-billing agency, you are not buying a result. You are buying access to capacity. The result — whether the feature ships, whether it works, whether users adopt it — is your problem. The agency's obligation ends when the clock stops. This is why scope creep is such a dominant narrative in the agency world: the client wants outcomes, the agency delivers hours, and when the hours run out before the outcome materializes, nobody is clearly at fault. The contract said '200 hours.' The contract delivered 200 hours. That it produced an incomplete product is, technically, a scope conversation.
The Outcome-First Model and Why It Changes Everything
When your development partner is on a subscription — when the question 'did this sprint succeed?' is answered by whether the right thing was built and shipped, not by whether enough hours were logged — the entire psychology of the engagement changes. Meetings become shorter, because they're not billable. Revisions become welcome, because they improve the outcome rather than extending the invoice. Speed becomes a shared goal, because a partner who delivers faster is demonstrating more value, not less revenue. We've found that this shift in incentive structure produces better code, better communication, and better products — not as a side effect, but as a direct consequence of what both parties are optimizing for.
The Standard We Hold Ourselves To
Outcome-oriented development requires a higher internal standard than time-billing does. When you bill by the hour, a half-finished feature is a billable half-finished feature. When you operate on a subscription, a half-finished feature is a failed sprint. That distinction forces discipline. Every piece of work we ship is scoped to be completable within the sprint window, reviewed before delivery, tested against the spec, and production-deployable on the day it's called done. 'Done' is not 'coded.' Done is 'live, tested, and working for real users.' This is a higher bar, and we hold it deliberately because the bar is what makes the model worth choosing over anything else.
What This Means for the Client Relationship
In a time-billing engagement, the client often spends significant energy managing the vendor — tracking hours, reviewing timesheets, pushing back on scope, approving change orders. It's a relationship built on low trust by design, because the financial model creates adversarial dynamics around time. In an outcome-based engagement, the conversation is entirely different. We talk about what we're building next, why it matters, and what success looks like. We're not counting hours on your behalf. We're accountable to results. That shift — from managed vendor to trusted partner — is the thing clients consistently describe as the most unexpected benefit of the model.
The Accountability That Comes With It
Outcome-orientation is also, frankly, more demanding of us. When you sell time, a delayed feature is a scope conversation. When you sell outcomes, a delayed feature is a delivery failure. We accept that accountability — and we think it's the right standard. Our 14-day satisfaction guarantee exists precisely because of this commitment. If the outcomes aren't there in the first two weeks, you shouldn't stay. And if they are — which is consistently the case — you'll understand immediately why this model is the one we've built everything around.
Want to experience outcome-driven development firsthand? Start with a discovery call and let's talk about what 'done' looks like for your product.
Book a Discovery Call