A vendor comparison written by one of the vendors has exactly one path to being useful: transparency about where we lose. PostHog made this approach famous with comparison pages that concede real ground to competitors, and we’re following that playbook deliberately — the three concessions below are genuine, current, and the reason you might close this tab. If they don’t apply to you, the second half of the page is the argument for a call.

The three vendor types at a glance

	Traditional .NET shop	Large consultancy	Code Majesty
Typical shape	Offshore-heavy or generalist boutique	Accenture / Cognizant / EPAM tier	Five senior engineers, one principal
Hourly rate	Lowest — this is their win	Highest	Mid; priced per sprint, not per hour
Brand for board approval	Limited	Strongest — this is their win	Boutique
Who works on your account	Rotating, seniority varies	Large, layered teams	The same five seniors, no rotation
Accountability	Account manager	Engagement partner + delivery layers	One principal engineer, personally
AI tooling	Ad hoc, per-developer	Internal platforms, licensed per seat	Twelve-layer system, installed in your repo
What hand-off contains	The code	The code, plus decks	The code, plus the system that built it
Regulated-work evidence	Varies	Strong compliance process	Deterministic gates producing evidence per PR

Where we lose

On raw hourly rate

Offshore development at $25–$50/hr undercuts us decisively, and for well-specified work with strong internal review capacity, that can be the rational choice. We don’t compete on rate and won’t pretend to — our pitch is cost per shipped, reviewed feature, which is a different metric that not every buyer needs.

On brand recognition

If your board or procurement process needs a logo it already knows, Accenture-tier consultancies win before the conversation starts — and that’s not irrational. A recognizable brand is real risk cover for the executive who signs. A five-person boutique cannot give you “nobody got fired for hiring them,” and we know it.

On specialist domains outside our wheelhouse

We are .NET SaaS specialists. If your project is embedded firmware, game engines, SAP integration, or a mobile-first consumer app, a boutique that specializes in that domain will beat us on their home turf — hire them, not us. Depth only counts where it’s deep.

Where we win

Throughput per developer-hour

Our five engineers work inside the twelve-layer system: AI agents handle the mechanical share of implementation under deterministic guardrails — investigation gates, build gates, per-PR architectural inventories — while the humans spend their hours on decisions. The result is a small team with the effective throughput of a much larger one, without the coordination tax of actually being larger. Rate-card comparisons miss this entirely; per-feature cost comparisons don’t.

Guardrails for regulated work

Traditional shops adopting AI tooling mostly can’t answer the question “how do you know the agent’s code is correct?” beyond “we review it.” Our answer is mechanical: every agent action is hook-logged, every multi-file change is build-and-test gated, and every PR carries an architectural diff — evidence produced as a side effect of development, not assembled for the audit. For fintech, legal tech, and other regulated SaaS, that’s the difference between a vendor you can defend to a regulator and one you can’t.

Principal-engineer accountability

There is no account-management layer here. One principal engineer owns your engagement, attends your check-ins, and answers personally for what ships. When something goes wrong — and on real projects, something always does — you talk to the person who can fix it, not to someone whose job is to schedule a meeting with them.

Hand-off quality

This is the win we’d lead with. A traditional engagement ends with code and a knowledge-transfer crisis; ours ends with the system that built the code: the CLAUDE.md encoding your conventions, the hooks, the pattern snapshots, the AUTO-TABLE inventory regenerating in your CI. Your team inherits a working AI-augmented setup they can run without us — which means the productivity gain survives our exit instead of leaving with it. Scale-up CTOs tell us this is the line that made them call.

Questions to ask any dev shop — including us

Whichever vendor type you’re leaning toward, these seven questions separate the shops that will still look good in a year from the ones that won’t:

Who exactly will write my code, and will they still be on the account in month six? Rotation is where offshore economics quietly break down.
Do your developers use AI coding tools, and under what controls? In 2026 the answer to the first half is yes everywhere — the second half is where the answers diverge. “We review the output” is not a control; ask what happens before review.
What do I receive at hand-off besides the code? Documentation is table stakes. Ask whether the tooling, conventions, and CI checks that produced the code come with it.
Whose repository does the work live in during the engagement? If the answer isn’t “yours, from day one,” ask why.
What does ending the engagement look like? Notice periods, wind-down fees, and knowledge-transfer phases tell you how confident the vendor is that you’d stay voluntarily.
Can my engineers audit how the work was produced? Hook logs, build gates, and per-PR inventories make this a yes mechanically; otherwise it’s a trust exercise.
Who do I call when it breaks? If the answer contains the words “account manager,” add a week to every future incident.

We publish our answers across the twelve-layer system, the sprint page, and this comparison — and any vendor worth hiring should be able to answer all seven without a follow-up meeting.

When to choose whom

Choose a traditional or offshore shop when the work is well-specified, your team has the capacity to direct and review it closely, and the hourly cost floor is the constraint that matters most.

Choose a large consultancy when the engagement spans multiple workstreams and org change, procurement needs a brand it recognizes, and the budget accommodates the layers that come with it.

Choose Code Majesty when the work is senior .NET SaaS engineering, the environment is regulated or headed there, and you want the AI-augmented setup — not just its output — to still be working in your repo a year after we’re gone.

We’re a good fit for a specific buyer, not every buyer. If the concessions at the top of this page describe your situation, take them seriously — and if the second half does, the $80 consult below is the cheapest way to find out.