Spent years billing hourly for backend work and it never sat right — clients hate the uncertainty, and I ended up padding estimates to protect myself. So I switched to flat-fee-per-microservice.

Here's the logic: most startup founders don't need a whole platform rebuilt — they need one specific thing working. A webhook handler. An auth service. A payments integration. A notifications pipeline. Each of those is a bounded unit of work with a clear input/output contract, which means it's actually possible to scope it upfront.

So now every job is: define the service's job in one sentence, agree on the API contract, build it with Spring Boot on the backend + a matching frontend, ship it. Flat price, no surprises, no clock-watching.

If you're a technical founder trying to decide whether to hire a full-time backend engineer or ship faster — you probably don't need the former yet. You need 3-4 specific microservices built well. That's a very different (and much cheaper) problem to solve.