Frequently Asked Questions

Altima pricing

• Q: I understand that your prices depend on the project, but can you advise some ballpark ideas about the costs to create a web site with you?
• A: If we talk about turn-key solutions, like creation of a web site from scratch or full redesign, most of web sites that we created cost clients from $3,000 to $15,000.
• Q: Why your solutions are quite expensive?
• A: We would not call them expensive, it depends on what you compare with our prices. If you compare them with a company of the similar maturity level and experience, developing solutions of comparable quality, our prices are not high at all. According our estimation in fact our prices 30% to 50% lower than prices of providers, offering close level of quality. The math is pretty simple: for our business the main expense is the cost of human resources. We have a combined delivery model, which allows us to obtain highly professional designers and developers for moderate (while not cheap, good things are rarely cheap) rates and that is reflected in our prices. Check this diagram to see, how we see our position on the Melbourne market.

Altima delivery model

• Q: "Combined delivery model", what does it mean?
•  A: It means that Altima is a global business: we do design and development in Europe (Ukraine) while account management, project management, business analysis and consulting are done in Australia (Melbourne). Such approach allows us to offer competitive pricing combined with excellent quality of communication.
• Q: Where is your business registered? Are you insured?
• A: We registered in Melbourne metro area (Southbank, Victoria) and we have a professional indemnity insurance (including a cover of our sub-contractors)
• Q: Why your development centers are situated in Europe? I believe that it is not the cheapest way to outsource.
• A: The answer to this question is twofold. First of all, in fact Altima had been created in Ukraine and then became a global business, that serves customers worldwide, so it is quite a naturally to have our development centers there. In addition, our experience of work with a global clientele shows that the outsourcing to Ukraine provides a good value for money: while it is definitely not the cheapest destination in term of per hr rates, a good education, better culture fit, a high level of creativity and an ability to solve complex and non-standard problems make designers and developers from Ukraine a good choice.

Custom web design and development

• Q: Why should I pay decent money for a custom web site if I can buy a nice template and install it with good free CMS for couple hundred dollars?
• A: That's a good question and probably for some kind of project (like personal blog) template approach is OK and economically reasonable. However if you work in the competitive industry and a web site is an important part of your business, the use of template is a good way to sacrifice one of your competitive advantages.

For a start,  template as a rule is not exclusive (in fact if it is exclusive it usually costs 20-30 times more), so there will be from several to several hundreds of web sites with very close to your site design and some of them may be your direct competitors. We really had such experience with our new US client, who discovered that his web site looks very similar with one's of the direct rival. Do you want to be confused with your competitor? 

Next, templates limit your flexibility. They are built in some way and you have to accept it, that means that you can not realize all great ideas that may make your web site the best in pack and stand out from the crowd. So you have to suit your business to the frames of template you bought. Of cause you select the template that is best for you, but it is hard and requires the professional designer's input to modify the template significantly and at some point it is just easier and finally more efficient to create a new custom design than change a template.

Finally, you nearly give up your branding with the template design. 

Thus use of templates instead of custom design means at least that you bury one way to provide your business with an advantage and put it ahead of competitors.

• Q: Do you always make a software solution, like CMS, from scratch? It looks like a re-invention of the wheel and take a long time.
• A: Of cause we do not always do a programming from the ground. In many cases we use our existing libraries and code, proven open source and 3rd party software. Our approach is to offer our clients the best way to solve the problem taking in account the project requirements and limitations. However (and we consider it as a big advantage) we are able to develop a completely new solution if such need arises and this is the best way to accomplish client's goal.