Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. Who is Macronimous, and how long have you been doing this?

Macronimous was founded in 2002 by Benny Alexander. Before starting the company, Benny had spent years working directly with international clients as a web developer and SEO professional — this was the pre-Google era, when Perl scripting and ASP were the tools of the web, and AltaVista and Yahoo! were where people learned search optimization.

That early foundation shaped everything that came after. We have been building websites, applications, and search strategies for international clients for 24 years and counting. A lot of agencies have come and gone in that time. We are still here, still founder-led, and still working with some of the clients who signed up with us in our first few years.

Q2. Why should I trust an Indian agency in 2026 when I could hire remote devs anywhere or use AI tools?

It is a fair question, and here is our honest answer: what international clients have trusted us with for the last 24 years is not just code — it is continuity, accountability, and a team that stays. Freelance marketplaces give you individuals who rotate. AI tools give you output without judgment. Neither gives you a partner who remembers your architecture decisions, and interest toward client success from two years ago, or who picks up the phone when your production build breaks at midnight your time.

We offer offshore web development to several clients who have been with us for a decade or longer. That kind of retention is not an accident — it comes from doing the work properly, being easy to reach, and not disappearing when a project gets hard.

Q3. What makes Macronimous different from the thousands of other Indian web development companies?

We try to be a company that keeps learning — not just to exist, but to bring modern, right-sized solutions to each client. Our process is deliberately simple. We run Agile in a way that is flexible enough to absorb changes until the client is genuinely satisfied, rather than rigid enough to produce what the original document said and nothing else. We have multiple teams that work in a wide array of technologies.

The other thing worth saying plainly: a significant share of our work is white-label delivery for web agencies in the US, UK, and Australia. That forces a level of discipline most end-client-only shops never develop — clean code, clean communication, and the ability to disappear behind someone else’s brand when needed.

Q4. What technologies do you work in — and what do you not do?

We work across a defined set of technologies rather than chasing every new framework that appears. On the web side, that is React for web applications and React Native for mobile apps. On content management, we work with WordPress for CMS-driven sites and support e-commerce on PrestaShop, Magento, WooCommerce, and Shopify. On digital marketing, we cover SEO, AEO, and Google Ads. A full and current list is on our technologies page.

What we do not take on — and we think this matters as much as what we do: native iOS or Android development in Swift or Kotlin (we build mobile cross-platform via React Native instead), blockchain or crypto projects, and enterprise Java or .NET work. If your project needs these, we will say so upfront and, where possible, recommend someone who fits. We would rather decline cleanly than pretend to expertise we do not have.

Q5. Do you have client references and case studies I can see?

Yes, but with two things to understand. First, most of our client work is under NDA — especially white-label engagements, which are 85 to 90 percent of what we do — so we cannot publicly list the majority of our client base on our website. Second, we will never share a client’s name or contact details without their permission.

What we can do is arrange reference calls with clients who have agreed to speak on our behalf, matched where possible to your industry, technology stack, or project type. We can also share anonymized case studies that describe the work, the challenges, and the outcomes without identifying the client. If a reference call is important to your decision, ask us early in the conversation and we will set it up.

Q6. What engagement models do you offer — fixed price, dedicated team, or staff augmentation?

We offer five different pricing and engagement models, and the three that cover most projects are fixed price, dedicated team, and staff augmentation.

The choice between them is about structure, not cost. Fixed price works when scope is well-defined and you want a firm budget upfront. A dedicated team works when you want developers working exclusively on your project over months or years, reporting to you the way an in-house team would. Staff augmentation works when you already have a team and need to plug in specific skills — a React developer for three months, an SEO specialist for a quarter.

We will tell you which model fits your situation on the first call, and a detailed proposal is free regardless of project size — even for large SEO, web, or mobile builds.

Q7. How do you estimate projects — what do you need from me to give a quote?

A short discovery conversation and a written brief from you are usually enough for us to produce a detailed proposal. The brief does not have to be polished — bullet points, a rough sketch, or links to reference sites all work. What we need to understand is: what are you trying to build, who will use it, what systems does it need to connect to, and roughly when you need it live.

The proposal is free and typically turns around in two to three working days for standard engagements. The exception is when a project has already been fully specified in detail elsewhere and we are being asked to price a complete specification document — in those cases the proposal can take longer, because we are reviewing someone else’s analysis rather than doing our own.

If you have a tight deadline, tell us — we have moved faster when it mattered.

Q8. How do we kick off a project? What does week one look like?

Within two to three working days of signing off, you can expect a detailed project plan and schedule. Depending on the project type, week one also typically includes a first design iteration, an initial report or audit, an action plan, and specific questions back to you where we need clarity.

The underlying principle is simple: we keep clients in the light from day one. You should never have to ask what we are working on or when something is due.

Q9. Can you work on an existing codebase, or only new projects?

We take on both, and in 2026 a meaningful share of our work is picking up projects that started elsewhere — a previous developer who stepped away, an in-house team that got stretched thin, or a legacy codebase that needs modernization rather than a full rewrite. We are not rewrite-first; if your existing code is serviceable, we will work with it.

The first step on any inherited project is a short code audit. We look at the current structure, identify what works, flag what is risky, and give you an honest view on whether to continue building on it or invest in a targeted refactor. The recommendation comes from what is right for your project, not what generates more hours for us.

Q10. What’s the typical project size you work on — and have you handled enterprise-scale work?

Our project sizes span a wide range. On the small end, we take on focused engagements — a site refresh, a specific module, a short sprint of SEO work. On the large end, we have built and continue to support multi-year applications with dedicated teams running for years. Most of our work sits in the middle: three to nine-month builds where we act as the primary development team for a specific product or site.

We do handle work for mid-market and enterprise US clients, operating as a managed extension of their technology team and often alongside their in-house developers. What we do not do is pretend to be a 500-person global consultancy we are not. If your project requires Big-Four consulting scale or a vendor with global 24/7 operations centers, we are not the right fit — and we will tell you that upfront.

Q11. What’s the minimum engagement size you accept?

We do not publish a hard minimum because the right question is usually not “how small is too small” but “is this scope something we can deliver well.” We take on everything from single-page site fixes to multi-month application builds and ongoing retainers. If a request is outside our sweet spot, we will tell you upfront rather than accept it and underdeliver.

Q12. You’re in India and I’m in the US — how do we actually work together?

Most of our team works late hours from India, which gives them a relaxed morning with family before the workday starts. The practical effect for you: our evenings overlap with your mornings, so there is real-time overlap when you need it. For clients in Australia, we flip this — a team works early-morning hours from India. For clients in the UK and Europe, the overlap is the cleanest of all.

Since the pandemic, we have moved to flexible hours across the team. Most of us work from home, except for weekend meetings at the office. The core principle is that programmers need their brains rested — so we do not run night shifts. Good code comes from a good night’s sleep, and we would rather deliver well-rested work than pretend to be a 24/7 operation.

Q13. What hours is your team available for calls and real-time chat?

Our working overlap with US clients is typically your morning through early afternoon, Eastern time. With UK clients, we overlap through most of your working day. With Australian clients, our early-hours team catches your morning. Real-time chat is available during those windows; asynchronous work — code commits, progress updates, documentation — happens continuously across the rest of the day on our side.

For any emergency or production issue, we are reachable by the channels we have agreed with you, and we respond — we do not leave clients waiting for a business day.

Q14. Who is my main point of contact, and what happens if they’re unavailable?

Every project has one named point of contact. Depending on the size and nature of the work, this is a project manager, a team leader, or in smaller engagements the developer or designer directly. Whichever person it is, communication stays simple and direct — no ticket queues, no layers to go through.

If your main contact is away, we will have already briefed you on the backup person. You will never be stranded without someone who knows your project.

Q15. How do you price projects — hourly, fixed, or value-based?

We use all three models depending on the project. Details of our standard pricing models are published on our site at macronimous.com/pricing-models. What matters most in the conversation: we will tell you which model we recommend for your project and why, rather than force-fitting you into whichever one is most profitable for us.

Q16. What’s not included in your quotes that I should budget for?

Our quotes cover our labor — design, development, testing, project management, and post-launch support within the support window. The items we do not cover in our quotes are third-party costs that you will pay directly to the provider, because they stay in your name: stock photo and illustration licenses, third-party API subscriptions (CRM connectors, email services, mapping APIs), payment gateway transaction fees, commercial software licenses or premium plugin subscriptions, and any fixes requested after the free support period ends.

We list these in the proposal itself so there are no surprises at invoicing time. What is included — and what some agencies nickel-and-dime — is unlimited design and functional iterations within the agreed scope. We do not meter revisions.

Q17. How do you handle scope creep and change requests?

We do not pad the initial proposal with a hidden buffer — what we quote is what the scope covers. When new work comes up during the project, we explain the additional effort in detail, confirm the cost, and proceed only on your approval. There are no surprise invoices, and no “oh by the way” charges at the end of a project.

Q18. What are your payment terms, and which currencies do you accept?

We accept USD, AED, SGD, AUD, EUR, and GBP. For five of those currencies, we maintain virtual bank accounts in-country — which means you are paying a local bank transfer, not an international wire, and you avoid the fees and delays that come with it. We also accept international wire transfers with no extra charges on our side.

PayPal is available if you prefer it, though the transfer cost (approximately 5.5%) would be borne by the client. Most long-term clients prefer the bank transfer route for exactly that reason.

Q19. Do your developers use AI coding assistants like Copilot, Cursor, or Claude?

Yes, when it helps. Our developers use Claude Code, Kilo Code, and GitHub Copilot as their primary AI assistants, and we bring in other tools on a project-specific basis — especially on custom PHP development work. On projects centered around open-source CMS platforms like WordPress or Magento, AI involvement is lower simply because the problems are different — more configuration and customization than greenfield code.

The choice of whether to use AI on a given task is left to the developer’s judgment, based on what produces the best result for your project.

Q20. Is my source code or data being sent to third-party AI services?

We use enterprise and paid-tier AI services that do not train their models on our inputs — this is a non-negotiable for us. Your code is not becoming someone else’s training data.

Separately, we do not plug client APIs into AI tools. If you provide us with access to a CRM connector, an internal endpoint, or any integration that might carry confidential data, we analyze it first. If the API surfaces sensitive details we think should not be there, we flag it back to you before touching it. This has happened on real projects — and clients have appreciated the catch.

Q21. Who owns the code, designs, and content — including anything produced with AI assistance?

You do, in full, on completion of payment. This has been our policy since our inception in 2002, and the arrival of AI tools has not changed it. All code we produce for you — whether a developer typed every character or an AI assistant helped scaffold a function — is yours. At the end of the project we hand over all assets and source files.

We work on custom development for each client, and because of that there is very little code that could be considered reusable in any meaningful sense. We do not use our own proprietary IP inside client projects, and we never share code between clients. What we build for you stays yours.

Q22. Are you charging me less because AI makes your team faster?

Yes, effectively. Clients come to India for cost-effective delivery, and we know we operate in a crowded market. When AI makes a task faster, that shows up as either a shorter timeline, a lower quote, or the ability to take on more work for the same team size. In practice, you do see better rates from us than you would have two or three years ago — and that is partly why.

What has not changed is the review and accountability. A senior developer still reviews the output. The responsibility for the code is still ours, not the AI’s.

Q23. Will you sign an NDA before we share anything sensitive?

Yes, always. We can provide a sample NDA template if you want to draft your own from it, and we are equally comfortable signing the NDA your legal team provides — many of our larger clients go that route.

On our side, every employee signs an NDA as part of joining the company. For sensitive projects, we ask individual team members to sign project-specific NDAs on top of that. Subcontractors, where used, sign NDAs before they see any client material.

Q24. Where is my data stored, and who has access to it?

Our demo and staging servers are based in the USA — this is where we show you project progress during development. On release, files move to your own production servers or cloud account. We do not keep client applications running on infrastructure you cannot access.

Access on our side is controlled. Developers work on company-issued laptops in a VPN-controlled environment — not personal machines, not café Wi-Fi. When a team member leaves Macronimous, their access to your systems is revoked immediately and their laptop is returned. The only people who have project access at any time are the team members actively working on your engagement.

Q25. Do you provide hosting, or do I need to arrange it separately?

You arrange hosting on your own servers or cloud account, and we deploy there. This is deliberate: we do not keep client applications running on infrastructure you cannot access. You hold the keys to your own environment from day one, which means moving away from us — or moving between hosting providers later — is never blocked by us.

Where clients want guidance, we are happy to recommend appropriate hosting based on your stack and scale — whether that is managed WordPress hosting, a cloud setup on AWS or DigitalOcean, or dedicated infrastructure for larger applications. We will also set up staging and production environments for you during the project. But the accounts and billing stay in your name.

Q26. How is our source code managed — your GitHub, mine, or a shared one?

Our default is GitHub, and we are equally happy to work on your repository or set up a fresh one for you. Code is deployed directly to your staging environment on your servers — no middleman, no copy living on our machines after the fact. At handover, you hold the keys to the repository and the infrastructure.

Q27. What’s your QA process, and do you do automated testing?

We right-size QA to the project. On large-scale development, a dedicated QA team runs both automated and manual testing cycles. On smaller applications and open-source customization work, we run peer code review and a project manager check before handing the build to you for client-side testing.

We are honest about why this matters: full automated regression cycles on a small project would add meaningful cost that the project budget cannot justify — and at that point clients would rightly go elsewhere. Our approach is to match the QA rigor to the nature and budget of each project, rather than apply an enterprise-grade cycle to every engagement.

Q28. What documentation and assets do I get at handover?

On handover day, you receive the complete project package: full source code via your Git repository, all design source files (Figma, PSD, Sketch — whichever format was used), admin user guides for any custom applications or CMS setups, and deployment documentation describing how the system is configured.

On top of the files, we run live video walkthrough sessions — anywhere from a few hours to several days depending on project complexity — so your internal team or your next developer can actually operate the system, not just hold the artifacts. Code is written with comments and structure that another developer can pick up cold. Handover is meant to be a clean exit, not a dependency you can never escape.

Q29. What happens after launch — do you offer maintenance, and at what cost?

Every project includes a free support period. For smaller web development projects, the minimum is 30 days. For larger projects, we commit to something that very few agencies match in writing: up to 50% of the development duration as free support. A 12-month build gets up to 6 months of free post-launch support.

One fair caveat: support covers delivered and accepted modules as per the original scope. New feature requests after launch are handled through our change request process, not the support window. Ongoing retainers and maintenance packages are available after the free support period ends, priced by hours per month or on-demand.

Q30. What if I want to take the project in-house or move to another vendor?

We will help you do it cleanly. That means video calls, email support, documentation handover — whatever the incoming team needs to pick up the work. We have done this a number of times when clients built up their own in-house teams or when agency partners chose to bring development closer to their local office. On a few of those transitions, we have sent our own team members to work alongside the receiving team during handover.

You already have your code (on your GitHub) and your infrastructure (on your servers). Moving away from us is a question of knowledge transfer, not data recovery.

Q31. What happens to my project if Macronimous shuts down or gets acquired?

The short answer is that your project does not depend on us continuing to exist. Your code is already in your repository. Your infrastructure is already in your cloud account. You can engage any competent developer or agency tomorrow and they will have everything they need.

Beyond that, we do have a continuity plan in place — a successor structure within the company, and a trusted partner agency we could route clients to for a clean transition if it ever came to that. After 24 years and with a founder-led operation that has watched a lot of newer shops come and go, we think the continuity question is one of the reasons clients stay with us. We take it seriously.

Q32. Do you work white-label, and how do you stay invisible to your client?

White-label is not a side offering for us — it is how we have operated since inception. Roughly 85 to 90 percent of all our projects are delivered under a white-label arrangement, as the extended development team of agencies in the US, UK, and Australia.

We work entirely under your brand. For some partners, we communicate with their clients under our partner’s banner. For others, clients know us as “their developers in India” through a warm introduction. A handful of long-standing partners simply route work directly to us when their end clients cannot afford their local rates. We adapt to whichever tool stack you run on — Basecamp, Teamwork.com, Slack, Wrike, or any web-based project management platform.

One detail worth mentioning: on a few occasions, when an agency partner has wound down operations, they have — with their clients’ consent — handed those clients to us directly. We still provide support to some of those clients today. That is the kind of trust this model is built on.

Q33. Will your team ever contact my client directly?

No. Even when the client asks us to, we prefer to route everything back through you. Part of the reason is practical — our working hours do not overlap well with late-night US client calls, because we do not run night shifts — but the larger reason is that the white-label arrangement only works if it is absolute. We also know that working with a team like you makes payment collections easier for us. We get paid without chasing clients we have never seen.

Q34. What’s your policy on working with our clients directly — now or in the future?

We will not. This is a firm principle and it has held for 24 years across hundreds of agency partnerships.

We will be direct about why: the business we have built is founded on long-term trusted relationships with agency partners who send work our way over many years. A one-time tempter who approaches us to bypass their local agency — which has happened — is not a better deal for us. We have taken those situations straight back to the agency partner every time. We are not in the business of killing the golden goose, and the math on long-term partnership has always beaten the math on opportunism.

Q35. What’s the difference between SEO and AEO, and do I need both in 2026?

The way we see it, AEO is an extension of SEO, not a separate discipline. If your site is already SEO-ready, making it AEO-ready is not a tedious second project — it builds on the foundation you already have.

The focus shifts: we move toward content optimization with an answer-first approach, framing your content around the actual problems and pain points your customers are asking about, and implementing FAQ schema and structured data (JSON-LD) so AI systems can parse and cite your content cleanly. That is where we start.

One practical difference from traditional SEO: AEO does not usually require daily or heavy monthly effort. Our approach is to do a one-time AEO readiness pass — similar to on-page SEO optimization — and then monitor how AI assistants are answering in your category using specific tools, typically on a monthly cadence. Good SEO practice is a strong signal for AI systems too.

One note worth adding: our SEO experience goes back to the AltaVista and Yahoo! era, before Google existed. That long view matters when search evolves, because we have seen this kind of platform shift before.

Q36. Can you get my brand cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews?

We will not guarantee that your brand will appear in AI answers sooner or later — and we are wary of any agency that does. What we commit to is ongoing work: we will keep checking how AI systems are answering queries in your space, and we will rework content, structure, and signals to improve the odds.

This one requires your cooperation. AEO often needs content updates, additional detail on service or product pages, supporting material, and occasionally new content you have not written yet. We can do the technical and editorial work, but the subject matter authority has to come from you.

Q37. How long before I see SEO results?

It depends on the keywords, the content, and the competition. Some sites appear in Google search within weeks. Some take months. And honestly, some keywords may never rank where we want them to — that is the reality of search, not a hedge.

When results are slower than expected, the right response is to figure out what is actually happening and revise the strategy — which is what we do. We apply best practices and we stay current with what is working in search each month. But final outcomes are influenced by Google, by competitors, and by the wider market. Because of that, we do not promise or guarantee specific rankings or traffic numbers — we commit to the work, the transparency, and the willingness to change course.