r/Development

Hey developers,

I've recently been approached by a potential client looking for a custom resource management system.

I'm a software developer based in Kenya, and while I'm comfortable with the technical side of building applications, I'm still figuring out how to properly price client projects.

I haven't had a detailed requirements meeting yet, so I'm not sure whether they're looking at asset management, inventory, employee management, resource allocation, or a combination of these.

I'd love to hear from developers who've worked on similar systems.

- What did you build, and how complex was it?

- How much did you charge (or what would you charge)?

- Do you prefer fixed-price contracts or hourly billing?

- How do you estimate development time and account for changes in requirements?

- Do you charge separately for hosting, maintenance, and ongoing support?

I'm particularly interested in experiences from developers in Africa, but perspectives from anywhere are welcome.

Just trying to get a realistic understanding of the business side before I sit down with the client.

We’re five engineers at a seed stage startup. Everyone runs their own Claude Code or Cursor session, everyone ships fast, and on paper we should be moving three times faster than we were a year ago and we're not

Our backend guy is in Lisbon and the rest of us are remote, so he usually logs off around the time we start. Last Tuesday, his agent spent the afternoon moving our billing webhooks onto a queue. Clean work. The next morning I opened my session to fix a payments bug, and my agent had no idea any of it had happened. It read the old handler, wrote a fix for code that no longer existed, and told me it was done. I lost an hour before I even noticed.

Nobody did anything wrong. His agent knew what had changed and mine didn’t. There was no way for mine to find out unless a human told it.

That’s the part most multi agent discussions seem to skip. They’re usually about one person running five agents, and that person has the full picture in their head. A team doesn’t have one shared head.

We’ve tried a few things. Most tools seem built around the solo case and start falling apart once a second person joins, or they put agents in a shared chat where humans are still passing messages around. We ended up doing that too. Every morning, each of us pastes what our agent did into Slack, what it touched, what it decided, what it assumed. Then everyone copies the relevant parts into their own session. It’s at least 30 minutes a day and we still miss things because nobody remembers to write down the one assumption that matters two days later.

So the humans have basically become the sync layer for the agents. That feels backwards.

The only approach I’ve seen that seems aimed at the actual problem is a shared context layer, where agents on the same team can work from the same project state instead of separately briefed copies. We’ve started trying Tutti for that. Too early for me but it's promising but still let me know if you guys have any solution for this or any too or setup

Is it scalability, automation, integrations, security, flexibility, or simply the need to solve a problem that existing tools can’t handle?