Seven beliefs. No mission statements.
What guides every decision. Per principle the thesis, a concrete example from the work, and what it costs, because every principle has a price. Hover shows the variant that doesn't get chosen.
Seven principles as a 3D orbit with flippable panels.
- 01method64 builds its own software.An own SaaS platform, without external investors.
- 02Whoever plans, builds.No handover between sales and devs.
- 03No is also an answer.Better no fee than a useless product.
- 04South Tyrol, not Silicon Valley.Small, local, no VC pressure.
- 05Architecture before the first line of code.Data model before code, important decisions in writing.
- 06Every week a result.Deployable slices instead of big-bang demos.
- 07After launch, it really starts.Four weeks of hypercare, then pay-per-use.
method64 builds its own software.
- Climactra: a SaaS platform for CO₂ accounting in the hotel sector. From the data model to the invoicing engine, all built in-house, without external investors.
- This site itself runs on an own Hetzner server, with an own form backend, with self-hosted Umami. No Vercel, no Webflow, no form builder.
Affiliate margins and quick launches are off the table. Spinning up a white-label CRM is a weekend, Climactra is a year. But method64 never recommends something it hasn't run itself.
Whoever plans, builds.
- In the first call sits the person who will write your code. No slides from a sales deck, no discovery-workshop choreography.
- Architecture decisions are made by whoever implements them, not a solution architect who hands the ticket off afterwards.
method64 doesn't scale through pyramids. One active build phase at a time, without five parallel projects. Anyone who wants an agency that sends a different account manager to every meeting is in the wrong place.
No is also an answer.
- Requests get declined when the problem is solved by an Excel template. Better no fee than a product nobody needs.
- When the tech problem doesn't fit the stack, the request gets referred on, even to colleagues outside the own pipeline.
Revenue that other agencies would take. Saying "no" costs real money, and it's the most important investment in recommendation quality.
South Tyrol, not Silicon Valley.
- Set up small, no overhead. No office, no marketing manager, no investor wanting quarterly growth.
- Hosting in the EU (Hetzner Falkenstein), mail at IONOS, analytics self-hosted. GDPR is built in, not patched in afterwards.
method64 will never be a 50-person agency. Big clients who need ten parallel streams aren't the market. Growth stays slow and intentionally small.
Architecture before the first line of code.
- Data model, API contracts and deployment strategy are settled before the first line of code is written. Frontend and backend can work in parallel without blocking each other.
- Important decisions noted in writing, six months in, you still know why the DB is Postgres and not Mongo.
The first one or two weeks look like nothing is happening. Anyone who wants weekly UI mockups suffers. Anyone who still has the same data model in month six wins.
Every week a result.
- Every two weeks a deployable slice plus status update on the current state, no mockup, no demo stub. Should it stop after eight weeks, you'd have four working increments, not zero half-finished ones.
- Feature flags + canary deploys instead of "everyone cross your fingers". If a feature doesn't work, it gets switched off, no rollback drama.
Slice planning and status updates cost time that big-bang sprints seem to save. Pure code time is lower than for teams that only deliver at the end. In return there's no "it'll work out, trust us".
After launch, it really starts.
- Four weeks of hypercare in the standard offer. Same response time as before (usually the same business day), logs get read and fixes ship.
- Pay-per-use as default maintenance. You reach out when something's up; billing is by the hour. No minimum retainer for nothing.
Billing on the first of the month isn't an option. Cashflow is more irregular than at agencies with fixed maintenance contracts. In return, customers come back, because they don't pay for silence.