Straight answers about working with us

Three things, done deeply: websites and web applications, SaaS products (from a first MVP to multi-tenant platforms) and data engineering (pipelines, warehouses, dashboards and analytics). Most of our clients are New Zealand and Australian businesses with roughly 10 to 500 staff, plus founders building a product from scratch. We don’t build native iOS or Android apps as a core service — where a mobile experience matters we usually recommend a responsive web app or PWA, and we’ll tell you honestly if a native app is the better route.

Yes. Book a free 30-minute discovery call with our Wellington team. We’ll listen, ask questions and give you an honest view of feasibility, approach and ballpark cost in NZD. There’s no charge and no obligation — you’ll leave with useful advice either way, even if the advice is “you don’t need us for this”.

No. A clear goal and a rough idea are enough — turning that into a specification is exactly what our Discover phase is for. It helps to know who the product is for, which systems it needs to talk to, and any budget or deadline you’re working to. If you already have documents, designs or an existing codebase, great — we’ll work from them.

Both. For startups we focus on getting a lean, well-architected MVP to market quickly so you can validate with real users without building things you’ll throw away later. For established companies we typically modernise, integrate or replace existing systems — or build the data platform that finally joins them up.

We’re set up for projects of a few weeks’ work and upwards — a marketing website is usually the smallest fixed-scope project we take on, and small changes to a live product are better handled under a care plan than as a stand-alone project. If what you need is smaller than that, we’ll say so on the call and, where we can, point you to someone better suited.

We can usually hold a discovery call within a few business days, and a Discover phase typically begins two to four weeks after a proposal is signed, depending on team availability. We’d rather give you a realistic start date than promise one we can’t keep — ask about current capacity on the call.

Yes. We’re headquartered in Wellington and most of our clients are in New Zealand and Australia, but we work with businesses further afield too. Between our Wellington and Goa hubs we cover a broad span of working hours, and every contract is with a New Zealand-registered company, Abnova Limited, under New Zealand law.

It depends on scope — and we won’t hide behind that. After the discovery call you’ll get a ballpark range; after the Discover phase you’ll receive a fixed-scope, fixed-price proposal with an exact figure in NZD. As a rough guide, marketing websites sit at the lower end, SaaS MVPs and data platforms in the middle, and multi-tenant platforms or large migrations at the upper end. Our project brief form lets you indicate a budget range so we can recommend an approach that fits it rather than one that blows it.

We agree what will be delivered, by when and for how much before we start — and that price doesn’t move unless the scope does. If you want to add or change something mid-project, we tell you the impact on cost and timeline first, and nothing changes until you approve it in writing. If we’ve underestimated the agreed scope, that’s our risk, not yours. No hourly-rate surprises.

The 30-minute call and ballpark estimate are free. The Discover phase itself — the workshop, stakeholder interviews, technical audit and architecture options that produce your fixed-scope proposal — is a short, fixed-price piece of work quoted up front, typically one to two weeks. Everything it produces is yours to keep whether or not you continue with us. For small, well-defined websites we can often go straight to a proposal.

Third-party costs you pay directly: cloud hosting, domains, software licences and paid APIs, payment-gateway fees, stock imagery, and any content or copywriting that isn’t in scope. We list every expected third-party cost in the proposal with an estimate, and we set those services up in your own accounts so the bills — and the control — stay with you.

Payments are tied to milestones in the proposal — typically a deposit on signing, payments at agreed delivery points and a final payment on go-live. Dedicated teams and care plans are billed monthly in advance. All invoices are issued by Abnova Limited in New Zealand dollars, with GST where applicable.

Abnova Limited, a company registered in New Zealand and trading as ABNOVA Digital. Your contract is under New Zealand law with a New Zealand entity, regardless of where the engineering work is performed — so your legal position is the same as with any local supplier.

Usually below a fully Wellington- or Auckland-based team of the same seniority, because most engineering hours are in Goa; usually above a pure offshore outfit, because you’re paying for New Zealand leadership, design, architecture and accountability under a New Zealand contract. We compete on value and certainty rather than on being the cheapest quote — and we’ll tell you if a cheaper option genuinely fits your situation.

Yes. See our engagement models: a fixed-scope project, a dedicated team (named senior engineers on a monthly retainer you can scale up or down) and care plans for live products. Many clients start with a fixed-scope MVP and move to a dedicated team once the product is live and evolving.

You can. Our agreements include fair notice periods, and because the code is in your repository from day one, you keep everything delivered and paid for up to that point. We’ll hand over cleanly, with documentation — and pick up again later if you want to.

Strategy, design, solution architecture, project leadership and your day-to-day relationship are run from Wellington. The majority of the engineering — development, testing and DevOps — happens at our Goa hub in India, under Wellington’s direction. It’s one company with two locations, not a New Zealand front for a third-party vendor. Read more about our model.

Four things make it different. Your contract, project lead, designers and architects are in New Zealand. The Goa engineers are our employees, not a subcontracted vendor. Every line of code goes through the same review and pipeline regardless of where it was written. And you own the code, repositories and cloud accounts from day one. You get the economics of a distributed team with the accountability of a local one.

A Wellington-based project lead is your single point of contact and is accountable for the outcome. You’ll also talk directly to the engineers building your product — in stand-ups, the weekly demo and your shared Slack or Teams channel — rather than through an account manager relaying messages. English is the working language across both hubs, and every engineer presents and writes up their own work.

Employees. Every engineer is a full-time ABNOVA Digital team member working under the same standards, tooling, security policies and code-review process as the Wellington team. We don’t subcontract client work to third parties or freelance marketplaces.

India is 6½ to 7½ hours behind New Zealand, depending on daylight saving, so Goa’s morning overlaps with Wellington’s afternoon. That’s when stand-ups, demos and decisions happen — live, in both time zones. Work you brief in your afternoon progresses while you’re offline, and you see the result the next morning. The current overlap is shown live on our home page.

It’s rare — low staff turnover is one of the reasons we chose Goa — but we plan for it anyway. Every part of your codebase has been reviewed by at least one other senior engineer, decisions are documented in the repository, and dedicated teams have a named backup for each role. If someone does move on, we manage the handover inside the team, and your agreed price doesn’t change.

Absolutely. Our Wellington team is happy to meet at our office or yours, and to run discovery workshops in person anywhere in New Zealand. Video works well for everything else — and clients travelling to India are always welcome in Goa.

A marketing website is usually six to ten weeks from kick-off to launch; a SaaS MVP or data platform three to five months; larger platforms and migrations longer. Every proposal includes a realistic timeline with milestones, and typical durations for each phase are on our process page. The biggest variable is usually how quickly decisions and content come back from your side.

You’ll see working software at a live demo every week, receive a written progress summary every Friday, and have a shared channel with the team for everything in between. You can also test features yourself on a staging environment as they’re completed — and the code is in your repository to look at whenever you like.

Expect a two- to three-hour workshop during Discover, a couple of design review rounds, and then roughly 30 to 60 minutes a week during Build for the demo and feedback. User acceptance testing before launch needs a little more. The most valuable thing you can give us is timely decisions.

Yes. Design is part of every project and is led from Wellington: user flows, wireframes, a clickable prototype you can test with real users, and a UI design system the engineers build from. If you already have a brand or an in-house designer, we’ll work alongside them rather than start over.

Whichever fits the job. For content-led marketing websites a well-built WordPress site is often the right answer — fast, secure and easy for your team to edit. For online stores we’ll usually recommend Shopify or a headless commerce set-up. For SaaS products, portals and data platforms we build custom with modern frameworks. Either way we’ll explain why we’re recommending one over another, including the long-term cost of each.

We pick the stack for the job, favouring mature, widely supported tools your team can hire for later. Common choices include TypeScript, React and Next.js, Node.js, Python and .NET, PostgreSQL, AWS and Azure, and Snowflake, Databricks, dbt and Airflow for data work. We’ll explain the trade-offs behind every recommendation — and we won’t choose something exotic just because it’s interesting.

Yes — most projects involve at least one integration. We regularly connect to accounting and ERP systems such as Xero and MYOB, CRMs such as HubSpot and Salesforce, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, payment gateways such as Stripe and Windcave, e-commerce platforms, and older in-house databases with no API at all. Integrations are mapped in Discover so they’re priced and planned, not discovered mid-build.

Yes, as standard. Everything we build is responsive and tested on real devices, and we design and build to WCAG 2.1 AA at minimum — the benchmark the New Zealand public sector works to — with accessibility and performance checks run before launch. Accessible products are also faster, rank better and reach more customers, so it’s never an optional extra.

Every change goes through the same automated pipeline regardless of who wrote it: linting and type checks, automated unit, integration and end-to-end tests, dependency and secret scanning, then review by a second senior engineer before it merges. Nothing reaches staging without passing all of it. The full list is in our engineering standards.

Yes, where they make us faster without lowering the bar — assisted coding, test generation and documentation. Every line still goes through the same human senior review and automated pipeline as any other code. We don’t put your proprietary code or data into public AI tools; we only use approved business-tier tools whose terms exclude training on customer data, and we’ll follow your own AI policy if you have one.

Yes. We start with a technical audit so we — and you — know exactly what we’re inheriting, then agree a plan to stabilise, improve or migrate it. We’re honest when a rewrite is the better option, and equally honest when it isn’t; most of the time the right answer is a staged modernisation rather than starting again.

You do. Our contracts assign the intellectual property in the work we create for you to your company once it’s paid for. Code lives in your repositories and runs in your cloud accounts from the first commit, so there’s nothing to “hand over” at the end — you’ve had it all along. Open-source libraries we use stay under their own licences, which we track and keep business-friendly.

Yes, happily — yours or ours. Just mention it in the brief form or at the start of the call, and we’ll have it signed before you share anything sensitive.

Least-privilege access to your systems, secrets kept in a proper secrets manager (never in code), dependency and secret scanning in CI, data encrypted in transit and at rest, multi-factor authentication on every account, and access removed the day someone rolls off the project. We work within the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020 and your own policies, and can support Australian Privacy Principles and GDPR requirements where relevant.

Only when a task genuinely requires it, and then under the same controls as anyone in Wellington: named accounts, least privilege, audited access and removal when the task ends. Wherever possible we develop and test against anonymised or synthetic data rather than live records, and your data stays in your chosen region — it isn’t copied to India. If your privacy obligations require Wellington-only access to production, we design the delivery around that.

Wherever you need it to be. Most New Zealand and Australian clients choose AWS or Azure regions in Sydney or Auckland. Data residency and sovereignty requirements are captured in Discover and built into the architecture from the start, not retrofitted.

Yes. We regularly complete vendor security questionnaires and due-diligence checks, hold professional indemnity and public liability insurance, and can share our security practices, policies and references on request. For larger organisations we’re happy to work within your procurement process and contract templates.

No. Because you own the code, the infrastructure and the documentation, any competent team could take over tomorrow. We’d rather earn the ongoing relationship each month than rely on lock-in — and we think that’s exactly why most clients stay.

A hypercare period where the team that built it watches it closely and responds fast, followed by whichever ongoing arrangement suits you: a care plan with agreed response times, a dedicated team for continued development, or a clean hand-over to your own people. Launch is the start of the Grow phase, not the end of the project.

We set up and manage hosting in your own cloud account so bills and control stay with you, and we can maintain it under a care plan — security patches, upgrades, monitoring, backups and small improvements. You’re never dependent on infrastructure we own, and you can see exactly what hosting costs each month.

Care plans come with agreed response times based on severity — a production outage is treated very differently from a cosmetic bug — and those targets are written into the agreement, not implied. Monitoring and alerting are configured before launch, so we usually know about a problem before you do. During the hypercare window after go-live, the engineers who built the product are on call across both time zones.

Yes. Fixed-scope projects include a warranty period after go-live during which we fix defects in the agreed scope at no cost; the length is specified in your proposal. Warranty covers things that don’t work as agreed. New ideas and changes are handled through a care plan or a new scope, so the line is always clear.

Technical SEO is built into every website we ship — clean structure, fast load times, structured data, accessibility and analytics set up correctly. Ongoing content and campaign marketing isn’t our core business, so we’ll work alongside your marketing partner or recommend one we trust, rather than sell you something we don’t do best.

Yes — documentation and hand-over training are part of every Launch phase, and we can run deeper knowledge-transfer sessions, pair programming or a staged handover if you’re building an in-house team. Plenty of clients keep a light care plan in place while their own developers find their feet.