Taking new briefsFull-stack engineering, for funded US product teams
Send me your project. I take it from brief to shipped.
Agentic full-stack developer, freelance since 2015, Warsaw, Poland (CET)
I’ve shipped more than 50 client projects since 2015, and that experience decides what I build and what I leave out. Go, TypeScript and Python, React, Django, Postgres and AWS. I pick what fits your product and own all of it, from the database to the screen. One client has kept me for 14.5 months, sprint after sprint.
Send me your projectSee the price
Within one working day of a complete brief you get a written plan, free. The first milestone is up to 20 hours at USD 65 per hour, and you pay for it only if you accept it.
Code merged by maintainers at Dagu, Vendure, CISO Assistant, Appium, Sympozium and Google Chrome samples.
- Client projects shipped since 2015
- 50+
- One client since August 2025, hourly then in sprints
- 14.5 months
- Merged pull requests in other people’s repositories
- 300+
- Price, one rate for all work
- USD 65 an hour
[1]Proof
What the maintainer wrote when he merged the fix
Merged dagucloud/dagu · Go · 4.5k stars · merged 7 Oct 2026
Stop gracefully on SIGINT and SIGTERM fix(worker)
+ stop the pollers first, then drain running tasks + forward SIGTERM to each running task + tests in signal_unix_test.go and lifecycle_test.go
All checks passed
“The drain design is the right one, and the writeup made it easy to verify”
[2]Price
One rate, three steps, and a first milestone you pay for only if you accept it
A free project plan within one working day
Send the brief, the repo and the files. I read them and send back a written plan with the scope, the milestones, the risks, an estimate and what I need from you. A single bug works too, and then the plan is a diagnosis. When the repo is public and you say yes, a draft pull request comes with it.
A first milestone with an acceptance guarantee
Up to 20 hours at USD 65 per hour. The acceptance criteria are agreed in writing first, and if the result doesn’t meet them, you don’t pay for it.
Then USD 65 per hour, milestone by milestone
Invoiced weekly for the hours worked, with one written report each week. No retainer, no minimum, and the code is yours once each invoice is paid.
One rate covers the whole stack, because the agent lanes do the legwork in parallel and I bill only my own hours. No retainer, no minimum, and the only paid step before you’ve seen the work is a first milestone you can reject.
[3]Sizes
What a whole project usually costs
Fix and harden a product
About 40 to 80 hours over 2 to 4 weeks, so USD 2,600 to 5,200. Failing jobs, slow pages, security gaps and missing tests, each closed with a written before and after.
A feature, end to end
About 80 to 160 hours over 3 to 6 weeks, so USD 5,200 to 10,400. The database change, the API, the screens, the tests and the release, delivered in milestones you accept one by one.
A product, first release
About 200 to 400 hours over 2 to 4 months, so USD 13,000 to 26,000. Scope, architecture, build, deploy and handover, with a working release at the end of every milestone.
A product team’s backlog
About 400 to 750 hours over 3 to 6 months, so USD 26,000 to 48,750. A standing lane next to your team, planned in milestones you accept one by one, with a written report every week.
For scale, sprints 13 to 18 for my long-term client came to 316 billed hours. Your written plan names the real number for your project before any paid hour, and you can stop after any milestone.
[4]Direct
Why I work directly with clients
Work first, payment after
You see working, tested code before you pay. The first milestone is billed only if you accept it, and every milestone after it works the same way.
Pay the way you prefer
Bank wire, PayPal, GitHub Sponsors or crypto, invoiced in USD. If you want the money held until you accept the work, I use an escrow service you are happy with.
No platform in the middle
For years my client work ran through freelance platforms. A platform can close an account overnight, even mid-project, so I left to work directly. You deal with the engineer doing the work, and nobody else holds the relationship.
My full-time work
Client engineering is my living, so every relationship matters. I reply within one working day, keep your code and data private, and treat your decision to hire me with the respect it deserves.
[5]Why me
Why hire a contractor, and why this one
This is business to business. You buy finished, accepted work from my company, not a seat on your payroll. You carry no benefits, no payroll taxes, no recruiting and no promise of permanent work. A project runs for as many sprints as it needs, then it closes with a handover, a pause and a handshake, and you can come back any time.
[1] You pay for results
A US employer spends about 30 percent of each hour’s cost on benefits, before hiring and idle weeks. With me you pay for accepted milestones, and nothing else.
[2] A project with an end
No payroll, no notice period, no promise of permanent work. A project runs for the sprints it needs, then closes with a handover note and a handshake.
[3] Four clients at most
I keep three to four clients at a time, 10 to 40 hours a week each. That limit is why each one gets my full attention.
[4] No hand-holding
You write the brief once. Within one working day of access you get a full written report, with what I found, what I will do and the risks.
What you get is an engineer with more than 50 client projects shipped since 2015, who also builds and runs live products that real people use and pay for. I choose my clients and how I solve their problems, so the price is a rate for results, ready from the day you sign the contract.
Source for the 30 percent, BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation.
[6]Case studies
Shipped work, with the numbers
A clinical platform built over 11 months, fixes inside two AI agent platforms, and production bugs in workflow and messaging systems. Private clients are anonymized. Open source work links to the merged pull request.
A market research platform, 14.5 months with one client
One engineer across the whole stack, sprint by sprint, with every fix measured before and after.
14.5Months with one client
2025 to 2026, HealthcareA clinical documentation platform
One structured form that writes the operative note, the referral letter and the research record.
Under 1 sForm load, down from 8 to 12 seconds
2026, Agent systemsFixes inside open source agent platforms
Memory limits, tool discovery, lost execution records and stale socket bindings, fixed with regression tests.
5Pull requests merged in Sympozium in one week
Products I design, build and run
Every screen, diagram and line of code below is mine, from the first sketch to the store release.
Tab Suspender Pro, a Chrome extension I design, build and run
A timer that silently never fired, found and fixed, then a full redesign around one idea.
4,000Chrome Web Store users
2026, Consumer finance toolsAsset Loan Calculator, payment math for the loans a car loan calculator gets wrong
Thirty live calculator pages that only ever show a payment built from the rate the visitor typed.
30Calculator pages live
2026, AI toolsToolRoutine, a catalog of 106 AI plugins I build and run
106 ChatGPT and Claude plugins, each with a page that shows a real result, used by 335 people in ChatGPT in one week.
335ChatGPT users in one week
2026, Developer toolsNoteMods, 132 Obsidian plugins built and released alone
132 plugins reached the Obsidian community directory in under four weeks, with 13,231 downloads.
132Obsidian plugins listed
[7]How it works
Your night is my working day
I work 09:00 to 18:00 in Warsaw, which is 03:00 to 12:00 in New York, so most of the work is done before your team starts. AI coding agents help with the legwork, on private code only where you approve it in writing, and every change is reproduced, tested and reviewed by me before it becomes a pull request. I bill only my own hours.
[8]Your risks
What goes wrong with contractors, and what I do about it
You won’t have to hand-hold me
I write the plan, the weekly report and every question, each with a default answer. I need one person who decides.
Nothing reaches production unapproved
I never push to your main branch. Work runs on a branch with test keys, and the NDA and DPA are ready to sign, and the security pack comes on request.
You pay for accepted work
The first milestone is paid only if it meets the agreed criteria. After that, if an accepted criterion fails, tell me within 10 working days and I fix it at no charge.
[9]Questions
Four questions every CTO asks before the first paid hour
Who your finance team pays
I invoice in USD through AUTOM8 LLC, my registered company. Your finance team gets a W-8BEN-E and the signed agreement before the first paid hour.
If I am ever unavailable
You already hold the code, every weekly report and a handover note another engineer can continue from. Nothing lives only in my head or in my accounts.
Private code and the NDA
I sign your NDA before I read a line of private code. Access is the minimum the work needs, and it ends with the project.
Who this is not for
If you need daily video meetings, someone in your time zone all day, or a fixed price without a written scope, I am not the right fit. Everything here runs in writing, with a report every week.
[10]About
About
Michael Lip
Agentic full-stack developer
Warsaw, Poland (CET)
I’m Michael Lip, an agentic full-stack developer in Warsaw, Poland (CET), freelance since 2015. Since March 2023 I’ve logged more than 7,300 engineering hours for 27 engineering clients, and five of them kept me for more than 600 hours each.
GitHub credits me as the reporter on 4 published security advisories, including a High 8.7 CVE in NLTK, the Python language toolkit.
Security advisories
