Fixed-price contract with milestones for defined development projects, hourly budget for ongoing consulting and tasks of uncertain scope. No personnel leasing.
How an engagement is structured shapes the entire project — from the first conversation through ongoing collaboration to acceptance. Clearly drafted contracts protect both sides: the client from surprises, the contractor from expectations that are not part of the contract.
Two proven contract models are available. Which one fits better depends not on which is cheaper — but on how clearly the project goal can be described at the outset.
Suitability: Suitable for development projects with a clearly describable result and defined milestones — typically end-to-end developments, hardware designs, FPGA designs, firmware modules with defined functionality.
How it works:
Advantages for the client:
What you as the client must provide:
Suitability: Suitable for ongoing support, consulting, code reviews, analysis tasks, and for projects whose scope is hard to estimate at the start — exploratory work, bug-hunting in someone else's code, analysis of inherited software.
How it works:
Advantages for the client:
What you as the client must provide:
| Situation | Recommended Model |
|---|---|
| End-to-end development with clear specification | Fixed-price contract |
| Hardware or FPGA design with defined requirements | Fixed-price contract |
| Bug analysis or code takeover with unclear scope | Hourly budget |
| Ongoing consulting over several months | Hourly budget |
| Support of an external project with selective input | Hourly budget |
| Fixed-price requirement from internal cost centre | Fixed-price contract |
When in doubt, I recommend an hourly budget for the first weeks — once requirements are clear enough, the engagement can be converted to a fixed-price contract. This transition keeps the entry point low-risk.
For end-to-end developments, project management is included in the fixed-price contract — requirements specification, architecture, milestone planning, reviews and acceptance documentation are part of the delivery scope. If project management is requested solely to accompany an existing client team, this is preferably handled through fixed prices per deliverable: requirements specification, architecture document, trace matrix, FMEA table, and so on. Hourly budgets are possible, but are better suited to ongoing technical accompaniment than to clearly delineated documentation deliveries.
Status: explicitly excluded.
Personnel leasing (Arbeitnehmerueberlassung, temporary staffing) is explicitly not offered. This follows from the company structure as an independent consultant with own company — the two contract models above cover all common project constellations.
In practice this means:
This distinction is not just a formal question — it protects you as the client from possible social-security consequences that can arise with disguised personnel leasing.
Every engagement begins with an initial consultation in which the project is briefly discussed. On this basis, a rough effort estimate emerges along with a recommendation for the contract model. The initial consultation is free and non-binding — even if no engagement results in the end. NDA-readiness for confidential projects is a matter of course.
A typical initial consultation lasts 30-60 minutes and takes place by phone or video conference. Subsequent project work also takes place predominantly remotely — this lowers costs and allows for a focused way of working. To prepare the initial consultation, a brief email with project keywords is sufficient.
The General Terms and Conditions apply to all engagements. They govern liability, warranty, confidentiality, contract duration and special cases such as early termination. The T&C are drafted to be directly usable for typical embedded projects; deviating agreements are possible on a case-by-case basis and are negotiated separately.