The crowd never knows. The show never stops.
Every good band borrows a player when the song calls for one — the crowd never knows, the show never stops. Same deal here: a client walks into your shop with something outside the wheelhouse — a Drupal estate, a gnarly WooCommerce build, a .NET app from another era, a migration nobody on staff wants to own — and instead of passing on the work or hiring for one project, you hand us the charts. We play the set under your name.
Session players care that the song lands, not whose name is on the marquee. There is no pitch deck coming after this, no attempt to get to know your client, no slow slide into being the agency of record. You booked a player for a run of shows; that is the whole arrangement.
About the “we”: Dead North is one senior engineer with thirteen years on the instrument, and trusted specialists when a job wants more hands. You are told who they are. Nobody gets subcontracted out to a bench you cannot see, which is the whole reason an agency borrows a player instead of buying anonymous hours.
The receipts are public and they are the kind your client’s CTO can check: a millions-of-nodes Drupal 7 migration that landed without losing a record,an observability agent watching 327 production sites, two contrib modules maintained on drupal.org, and a public record since 2013.
What the arrangement looks like
Reserved capacity
A block of hours a month, agreed up front and held for you — so your emergencies are never queued behind ours. Booked like a standing rehearsal, not scavenged from whatever the week left over.
Senior hands only
Whatever the tune needs: architecture, migrations, commerce, integrations, and the legacy corners nobody on your bench will touch. No junior backfill hiding inside the hours — you know who is on your ticket because it is the same person every time.
Findings your PMs can forward
Written handoffs, in plain language, in your template. Your project manager should be able to paste it into an email to the client without translating it first, and that is the standard it gets held to.
Your brand out front
NDA-friendly, your ticketing system or ours, deliverables carry your logo. Your client never needs to know Dead North exists — that is the product, and it does not bruise our ego any.
Shapes that have worked: a reserved day a week for a quarter, one named senior sitting in your standup through a launch, and plain overflow that needs to be gone by Friday. Tell me which of the three your month looks like and we will size it in one call — no discovery process, no deck.
Why there’s no number on this page
Agency work isn’t one shape. Sometimes it’s a reserved day a week. Sometimes it’s one named senior sitting in your standup for a quarter. Sometimes it’s overflow you need gone by Friday. Those three price differently and a table would lie about all of them.
One thing I’ll say up front so nobody burns a call: this is priced off what senior contract work costs in the States — my standard rate less a partner discount of10% to 20% depending on how much of it there is — not off a discount from my client rate. Minimum engagement is $5,000. If what you need is a bench at a third of retail, there are good shops that publish that number and I’m genuinely not one of them.
Everything else on this site carries a price, so an absence deserves a reason rather than a posture. Here it is, in market terms: the shops that publish a bench rate are, near enough without exception, selling packaged monthly capacity — a fixed pile of anonymous hours for a few hundred to a few thousand a month. That is a real product and some agencies should buy it. The one Drupal vendor I found who published a bench rate had printed it next to a note telling resellers what to mark it up to, which tells you which side of the table that number was written for. Your margin is your business, and it should not be computable from somebody else’s marketing page.
How a first one usually goes
One call, thirty minutes, no NDA required to have it. You describe the work and the month; I tell you whether I have the room and what the block would cost. If it fits, a one-page agreement, your paperwork or mine. First invoice net‑15, and the reserved hours start the month we sign.
When I’m the wrong call
Volume production work, template rollouts, and anything where the winning move is cheaper hours rather than better judgment. I’ll say so on the call instead of quoting it, and I have never regretted sending an agency somewhere better suited — they come back with the hard one.
The four questions everybody opens with
Do you talk to my client?
Only if you want me to. The default is that I don’t — work comes in through you and goes back out through you, and your client never has to learn a second name. When a technical call would save your PM an afternoon of translating, I’ll sit in as part of your team, under your project name, with an address at your domain if that is easier. You decide once, and I don’t drift from it. I also won’t solicit your clients, during the engagement or after, and that lives in the paperwork rather than the handshake.
Whose tools do we use?
Yours, nine times out of ten. Jira, Linear, Basecamp, a shared Slack channel, your repo, your staging, your deploy process — I would rather learn your setup than make your project manager learn mine. If you would rather not spend a seat, I will run it on mine and hand you the summary on your schedule. Either way it is NDA-friendly, and every deliverable comes back in your template with your logo on it.
What happens if you are busy?
That is what the reserved block is for: those hours are yours whether you spend them or not, so a bad Tuesday of mine is never a bad Tuesday of yours. Past the block, you get a straight answer the day you ask instead of the Friday you needed it. Capacity you cannot count on is worse than no capacity at all, so when I am genuinely full I say so plainly — and I usually know someone good who isn’t.
Can you take a rescue we do not want to own?
Often, yes, and it is a good share of this work — a Drupal 7 estate, a site whose original builder is long gone, a checkout nobody on your team wants to touch. It starts the way it starts for anyone: a paid assessment that says what is actually in there before either of us commits to a number. Then you decide whether to keep it, hand it back, or hand it to me. If the honest answer is that the thing wants rebuilding rather than rescuing, you get that in writing and you are welcome to pass it along as your own finding.
The rescue practice has its own page if you want to see how one of those reads before you hand it over — how a rescue actually goes — and if what your client really needs is somebody sitting at the strategy table rather than the keyboard, that is the fractional lead, which also runs fine under your banner.
Shop to shop, one call · no NDA required to have it · honest fit first