Never outsourced. Not once, since 2013.
Plenty of agencies say they are American. Fewer will tell you what happens to your project during a rush week. This page says exactly what the commitment covers, what it costs, and how to check the same claim anywhere else.
What we actually mean by it.
Built in the USA is a phrase that has been worn thin. Here is the specific version, so it can be held against us.
Every hour is worked by our own team.
Not a partner network, not a white label arrangement, not a contractor who invoices us and then subcontracts again. The person who writes your copy, designs your logo and builds your site is on our payroll.
No offshore development, ever.
Not for overflow, not for the parts nobody enjoys, not for a rush week when the schedule slips. There is no threshold at which this changes.
Your data stays in the United States.
Hosting, backups, file storage and the accounts holding your material. If a tool we use processes anything of yours somewhere else, we tell you which tool and why before we use it.
You can ask who did the work, and get a name.
On any deliverable, at any point, including a year later. If we cannot answer that, the claim on this page means nothing.
The handoff is where projects die.
Most of what goes wrong on a project happens in the gap between two people. A brief that was clear to the person who wrote it and ambiguous to the person who received it twelve hours later. Every additional link in that chain multiplies the chance of it, and an offshore subcontractor is a link the client cannot see or reach.
Time zones are not a scheduling detail.
When a question arrives at four in the afternoon and the answer comes back the following morning, a two minute clarification becomes a lost day. Do that five times in a project and you have lost a week to something nobody would ever put on an invoice.
Accountability has to be reachable.
When something breaks at a bad moment, the useful question is who fixes it and how fast. If the answer runs through a contractor you have never spoken to, in a company you did not choose, under a contract you have not read, then you do not have accountability. You have a phone number for somebody who has to go and ask.
Ownership only works if the chain is clean.
We hand every file, login and asset to the client at the end of a project. That promise is only as good as the agreements behind it. Work produced by a subcontractor under their own terms can carry rights questions that nobody discovers until the business is being sold or the work is being defended.
Security questionnaires are getting harder.
Selling to larger companies increasingly means answering where your data lives, who can reach it and what happens if a supplier is breached. A short supply chain makes those answers short. A long one makes them a project.
What it costs you.
A page like this is usually written as an advantage with no downside. That is not true, so here is the other side of it.
It costs more, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Domestic labor is more expensive. An agency subcontracting development overseas can quote lower than we can on the same scope, and sometimes considerably lower. That is a real difference and it is the reason the practice is so common.
It is not automatically better work.
There are excellent developers and designers everywhere, and there is poor work made domestically at a premium. Anyone claiming a nationality guarantees quality is selling something. What a short supply chain reliably improves is speed of response, clarity of accountability and cleanliness of ownership.
Sometimes it is the wrong choice for you.
If the budget only supports an offshore build and the project is straightforward, that can be a perfectly rational decision. We would rather say so than take a job at a price that guarantees a poor outcome. It has cost us work and it will again.
Five questions for any agency, including this one.
A great many firms describe themselves as US based while subcontracting the build overseas. Both things are technically true at the same time, which is what makes the phrase so easy to use.
- Ask who will do the work, by name and role, and where they sit.
- Ask whether any part of it is subcontracted, and to whom.
- Ask what happens during a rush week, because that is when the answer changes.
- Ask where the files, backups and hosting physically live.
- Ask for it in the contract. A claim that will not survive being written down was never a commitment.
Because a claim nobody can check is marketing, and a claim anybody can check is a commitment. If you ever find this to be untrue, we would want to hear about it before your next invoice.
Want to know who would actually work on your project?
Ask us. We will tell you names, roles and where they sit, before you have signed anything. It is a short conversation and it tells you a lot about any agency you are considering.
800.274.6775Free consultation · Family owned · Never outsourced
- You talk to the people who do the work, not an account handler.
- Fixed scope and fixed price before anything starts.
- You own every file, every login, and every asset. Always.
- Straight answers, including when the answer is that you do not need us.
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