Development as a service: pricing, comparison and choosing a provider

You have a list. A client portal to open, an export to fix, an integration with your invoicing tool, an AI agent to sort support requests. It grows every week, and every line asks the same question: who is going to do this, and how much will it cost? Development as a service answers both at once.

Development as a service, also called a development subscription, is a model where a company pays a development team monthly, at a fixed price, instead of paying project by project. You drop your requests in a queue, the team delivers them in your priority order, you approve. The term comes from design subscriptions, which appeared in the mid-2010s; applied to code, we also say unlimited development when the number of requests is not capped.

If you want the short version, definition and mechanics fit on one page: unlimited development, explained simply. Here we go further: how it works day to day, market prices, the limits, and how to choose.

The model comes down to five moves, always the same. What changes from one provider to another is what happens between the moves: who scopes, who reviews, and what you see while it is in progress.

Public development subscription offers range from about €1,000 to €6,000 a month for one slot, that is one active request at a time. The gaps come from three things: where the team is based, the commitment required, and what the scope covers (from websites only to full SaaS with AI and integrations). Figures taken from the providers' websites, checked on 22 September 2026; they move, check current terms.

Compare these amounts with what they replace. A salaried developer costs the company their loaded salary plus recruiting, tooling and management, whether the workload is there or not. A senior freelancer bills by the day, and their availability is never guaranteed. An agency prices every project, then every change.

So the right calculation is not “how much per month”, but “how many requests delivered and approved per month, and how much time I did not spend managing them”. A subscription that ships three verified improvements a month for €1,500 has nothing in common with one that ships three unreviewed ones for the same price.

Four ways to move the same product forward, four different logics. None is better in absolute terms: it depends on what you have to do, and on who, on your side, can coordinate.

A simple reading: the subscription wins when the need is continuous but variable, and nobody is there to manage a developer. The employee wins when there is full-time work and a tech lead. The freelancer wins for a sharp, time-boxed expertise. The agency wins for a whole product, fixed scope, closed price.

One case remains: you already have developers, and what is missing is technical leadership. You do not need a subscription, you need a fractional CTO.

Some offers present themselves as unlimited web agencies. How they work and the proof to ask them for are in unlimited web agency: how it works, how to choose.

A development subscription covers everything that makes an existing product evolve. The list below is Figue Unlimited's; other offers draw the line elsewhere, read it before signing.

What does not fit, in general, falls into three families: third-party costs (hosting, domains, licences, paid APIs, billed by your providers in your name), on-call cover (no night or weekend duty, no guaranteed incident response), and a whole product built from scratch.

And if your spec describes a V1 rather than a first test, the subscription will not fix the problem: your spec describes a V1, not an MVP explains how to reframe it.

One request at a time is a constraint. If your product requires ten parallel workstreams with hard dates, a one-slot subscription will not be enough, and ten slots will cost more than a team. The model is built for a continuous flow, not for a spike.

No guaranteed turnaround either. Serious providers do not promise a date per request: it depends on complexity, on the access you need to obtain and on approvals. What you should demand is visibility: knowing where every request stands, all the time. A “48 hours” promise on production code deserves a close read: it often hides a scope limit.

Finally, the team is shared. You have a point of contact who knows your product, but not full-time engineers waiting only for you. That is precisely what makes the price possible. A provider promising you a “dedicated team” for €1,500 a month is promising something they cannot deliver.

““Unlimited” refers to the number of Requests the Client may submit. It is not a commitment to any volume of work delivered, number of deliveries or speed of execution, which depend on the complexity of each Request.”

Slot, queue, request, staff augmentation, maintenance contract: the words of the model are defined in our glossary, with the meaning they have in our terms.

Offer pages all look alike: unlimited, no commitment, fast delivery. What sets them apart is in the terms and in the workspace. Six questions to ask before signing.

One last signal: how the provider talks about its limits. The one who tells you when it is not the right answer (the product from scratch, on-call cover, the in-house team to build) will also be the one who tells you when a request is badly scoped.

The underlying question is the same as with an agency or a freelancer: are you looking for a vendor or a partner? We covered it in how to choose who builds your software.