The build was $4,900. Getting our own data out of it cost another $1,800
Our partnership has four of us tracking a slow acquisition pipeline and a lender list, and we hired a consultant to build the whole stack. Pipeline for properties, a second pipeline for capital conversations, document request sequences, a shared calendar, a tracking number for inbound. He was good. Delivered in five weeks, $4,900, and it worked.
The problem was ownership, and I signed the engagement without reading it the way I read a purchase contract, which is a thing I will hear about from myself for a while.
He built us as a sub-account under his agency plan. That's normal practice and it isn't sinister. What it meant in practice: the billing relationship was his, the admin seat was his, the tracking number was registered to his agency, and the two integrations into our document storage were authorized with API keys created under his personal login. We were users inside our own system.
He took a full time job in November and gave 30 days notice on the agency. Sub-accounts on that plan had to be migrated or they go read only. Migration meant a new account in our name, re-importing contacts and notes, rebuilding the automations because they don't carry cleanly across accounts, re-authorizing both integrations, and starting the number port. Two of the sequences we simply lost, because there was no documentation, only what lived in his head, and he was polite but no longer being paid.
Cost of that: $1,800 to a second person for the rebuild, six weeks where follow-up happened in email, and one lender conversation that went cold because a scheduled check-in never fired. I can't prove the last one cost us anything, but it was the whole point of the sequence.
What I would do differently, stated plainly. The platform account gets opened by us, with our card and our email as the owner, and the consultant gets invited into it. Any tracking or texting number gets registered to our entity from day one, and the carrier registration paperwork stays in our files. Every integration gets authorized from a service login we control, not anyone's personal one. Documentation is a named deliverable with a dollar amount attached, a plain document listing each automation, its trigger, and what it sends, and 10 percent of the fee is held until it arrives. And the engagement letter says what happens on the day he stops working, in writing, before I pay the deposit.
None of this is exotic. It's the same instinct I'd bring to a title commitment, and I just didn't bring it to a software invoice.