Everything you'dhire an engineer for.Without the hire.
Senior engineers as an extension of your team. You write the request, we ship the reviewed pull request and own what lands in production.
One plan.
Your whole roadmap.
Send us the list. Get back reviewed pull requests.
- One request in active development at a time
- Small requests ship same or next business day
- Senior engineers on the team own every request
- Pause or cancel whenever you want
The math on not hiring
Playhype is cheaper because it's scoped to execution. You bring the roadmap and the calls; we ship the reviewed code. No strategy engagements, no standups, no one to manage.
- Past $230,000 all-in with benefits, payroll tax, equity and overhead
- 6 to 9 weeks to hire, then months to ramp
- One person, one thing at a time
- A nearshore agency bills $60 to $85 an hour, markup already in
- Recruiter placement fees add 15 to 25% of first-year salary
- An account manager between you and the engineer
- Execution and output only: reviewed, merged PRs
- A team of senior engineers, async
- Pause or cancel anytime
US pay: BLS OES 15-1252 and Built In, 2025 to 2026. All-in multiplier: MIT / Hadzima and BLS Employer Costs, 2025. LATAM: Howdy 2025 and Revelo 2026. Time to hire: SHRM and Gem, 2025. Replacement cost: Center for American Progress and SHRM.
The way engineering should've
worked all along
You've got a list of things to build and no interest in hiring another engineer to build them. Send us the list. We send back reviewed pull requests. No contractors to manage, no offshore team to onboard, no new headcount.
Recently shipped
Real pull requests, reviewed by senior engineers, merged into products people use.
See how it works →APIs, dashboards,
integrations & more
All the engineering you need under one roof.
The "we don't need to hire" plan
One flat monthly rate instead of another salary, another contractor, or another tool to babysit. We work like part of your team, and our senior engineers own every change before it touches your main branch.
An extension of your team
We work inside your repo, your board and your deploy pipeline from day one. No onboarding project, no ramp-up you pay for.
Async, not absent
No standups, no status calls. We're in your Slack and on your board every day, replying and shipping. You get output, not calendar invites.
One flat monthly rate
Same price every month. We don't bill hours, tokens, prompts or lines of code. You're buying engineering capacity.
Same or next-day turnaround
Small and standard requests ship the same or next business day. Larger builds come back in reviewable pieces, usually a few days to two weeks.
Senior engineers own the work
Our senior engineers plan, review and sign off on every change. We use AI to move faster; the team owns the result.
Pause when it's quiet
Roadmap slow this month? Pause. Busy again? Come back. Cancel whenever you want.
What we build
Clear scope up front. If it's not a fit, we say so on the intro call.
We build
- APIs and third-party integrations
- Stripe, billing and usage-based pricing
- Dashboards, admin panels and internal tools
- Auth, roles and SSO
- Background jobs, webhooks, cron and queues
- Migrations, refactors and performance work
- Bug fixes and long-standing tech debt
We don't
- 24/7 on-call or incident response
- Native iOS or Android apps
- Hardware, firmware or embedded
- Safety-critical or heavily regulated systems
- Greenfield projects with no requirements yet
- Brand and product design from scratch
Works with your stack: GitHub, TypeScript and Node, Python, Postgres, deploying on Vercel, AWS or your own infra.
Looking for data, AI and marketing systems rather than product engineering? That is a separate Playhype product: Playhype for Marketing.
The way it should've been done
- One request at a time
- Backlog as long as you want
- Small stuff, same day
- Pause or cancel anytime
Subscribe
Pick a plan and pile up as many requests as you want.
Request
Tell us what you want in plain words. A Stripe flow, a dashboard, a nasty bug, whatever's on the list.
Receive
Get back a reviewed pull request, a deploy, and docs. Small requests in a day or two, bigger ones in reviewable pieces.
You write the request.
We write the pull request.
Plain-English status the whole way. We only ping you when we actually need something, and we tell you exactly why.
"I want users to be able to subscribe and pay with Stripe."
Four deliverables: payment flow, subscription state, webhooks, and tests.
● Your turn: connect a Stripe test account
We're building it now.
✓ Nothing needed from you
Your Stripe subscription flow is up for review. PR #312, all checks green.
- Received done
- Analyzing done
- Plan ready done
- Building done
- QA & checks done
- Human review now
- Delivered next
Never "it's in the queue, we'll see."
Our senior engineers own
every change that ships.
An AI agent can open a pull request. It can't own the outcome. Every change here passes 8 automated checks and review by our senior engineers before it reaches your main branch.
- Build
- Unit & integration tests
- Lint
- Type check
- Security scan
- Dependency audit
- AI review
- No secrets in diff
How we keep your code safe
- Least-privilege GitHub App. You pick the org and repo. We never ask for a broad token.
- Isolated per client. Every task runs in its own sandbox that gets destroyed when it's done.
- Secrets stay in a vault. Scoped, time-limited, and never pasted into a prompt.
- Production stays read-only until you approve the change. Everything is logged.
- The code is yours. Your repo, your license, your IP, from day one.
Your company's data
stays yours.
Not a line in the footer. Here's what actually happens to your access.
$ nda.sign() → mutual, before any repo or credential changes hands
$ ai.training_data() → never. zero retention, nothing logged next to a prompt
$ github.scope() → one repo you name, revoked the day we're done
$ workspace.delete() → clones, branches, artifacts. confirmed in writing
# every line above is logged and visible to you
One price.
Your whole roadmap.
No hourly invoices. No token meters. No "we shipped 4,000 lines" reports. You're buying steady engineering capacity and senior engineers who own the outcome. Longer commitment, bigger discount.
- One request in active development at a time
- Stack up as many requests as you want
- Same or next business day on small requests
- Senior engineers own every change
- You own all the code
- Pause or cancel anytime
- Everything in Monthly
- 10% off the monthly rate
- Rate locked for 6 months
- Priority on your first request
- Everything in Monthly
- 20% off the monthly rate
- Rate locked for 12 months
- A quarterly roadmap review
All prices in USD. Discounts are against the $5,000 monthly rate: 6 months is $4,500/mo ($4,500 × 6 = $27,000), 1 year is $4,000/mo ($4,000 × 12 = $48,000). Day and Week are one-off, no subscription required.
Questions people actually ask
Do we need to meet?
No. Playhype runs fully async. No standups, no status calls. If you want one kickoff call to hand over context we'll do it, but after that it's requests in, pull requests out. Everything is written down on your board.
How do I send requests?
Through a shared board: Trello, Linear, Notion, GitHub Issues, whatever you already use. You add a card, we ask questions and post progress in the comments, and the work comes back as a reviewed PR that's merged and deployed.
Do I need to know how any of this works?
No. You describe what you want in plain words. You never have to touch a branch, open a pull request, or think about which model wrote what. If your team wants to review the PR themselves, great. If not, we'll deploy it.
Who's actually doing the work?
A team of senior engineers, each with 10+ years across US startups and scale-ups. One of them owns your request end to end, so you always know who's accountable, and the rest are backup so your work never stalls if someone's out. We use AI to speed up the boilerplate, reading the codebase, first drafts, tests and docs; the engineer plans, reviews and signs off on what ships.
How does billing work?
Monthly is $5,000, billed each month, cancel anytime. 6 months is $4,500/mo, billed $27,000 upfront ($4,500 × 6). A year is $4,000/mo, billed $48,000 upfront ($4,000 × 12). An Engineering Day is $300 and an Engineering Week is $1,400, both one-off. All prices in USD.
How fast is it, really?
Small and standard requests ship the same or next business day. Larger builds, like a billing system or a dashboard, come back in reviewable pieces, usually a few days to two weeks, so you see progress the whole way.
What if I only have one thing this month?
Then send us one thing. Pause the subscription when it's done and come back when the backlog fills up again. Nothing goes to waste.
Can you touch production?
Not without your say-so. Dev and staging we handle. Anything risky in production, like database writes, migrations, deletes, or payment and security changes, waits for your explicit approval. Every action is logged.
Who owns the code?
You do. It's your repo, your license, your IP, from the first commit. A Playhype subscription isn't required to keep anything we build.
What's not a good fit?
24/7 incident response, hardware, safety-critical medical or heavily regulated financial systems, and huge greenfield projects with no requirements yet. If we're not the right call, we'll tell you.