A collective of specialists,not an agency and not a bench.
Kraftonist is a group of independent engineers, designers and cloud architects who work together as one team. No employment contracts between us, no overhead to recover — and no layers between you and the people building your software.
Why this exists.
Software costs what it costs. What inflates a quote is rarely the engineering — it is the sales call, the account manager, the project manager, the office, and the margin that has to cover all of them before a line of code gets written. A client pays for that whole structure and receives, at the end of it, the work of two or three developers.
A collective keeps the developers and drops the structure. Every one of us runs independently and takes work on project by project, so your money buys specialist time and the tools it runs on. A budget that would buy a thin project from an agency buys a real one here.
The second thing it fixes is quality drift. On a staffed team, the person who understood your problem in the first meeting is often not the person implementing it six weeks later, and the detail that made it correct quietly goes missing. Here the people in that first meeting are the people who build it, and they stay until it is handed over.
What it does not mean is small-only work. The group scales from a single focused build to a company-wide programme — what changes is how many specialists join, never how many layers get added on top of them.
Gaurav Barde
Establisher
Gaurav established the collective and takes the first call on every engagement. He scopes the work and stays your point of contact. On larger projects the day-to-day engineering lead may be whoever is closest to the work — but you will be introduced to them, not reassigned quietly.
- 0
- Account managers between you and the build
- 100%
- Named specialists — you meet everyone
- 24h
- Reply to any message on a working day
- Right-sized
- Team built around the brief, not a fixed roster
The disciplines the collective covers.
Specialists rather than generalists — the person wiring your payment gateway has wired one before. Names and backgrounds are shared with you before a project starts, not published on a page.
We do not publish a team page. Everyone here works independently and has their own clients, so who is available changes — and a static grid of faces would be out of date within a month. You get the actual names, with their actual availability, on the first call.
From first call to a named team.
The part most agencies leave vague, written down plainly.
- 01
You describe the problem
A thirty-minute call, no charge and no obligation. We are listening for what the thing actually has to do, what already exists, and what is genuinely fixed versus merely assumed.
- 02
We name the specialists
Before anything is signed, you are told who would work on it, what each of them has built before, and when they are free. If the right person is three weeks out, you hear that now.
- 03
A lead is assigned and stays
One engineering lead owns the whole picture for the life of the engagement, and is your single point of contact however large or small the engagement turns out to be.
- 04
The group sizes to the work
A design-heavy phase pulls in designers; a migration pulls in cloud specialists. People join and leave as the work needs them, and you are never paying for a bench between phases.
Where the name comes from.
kraft — skill, and strength
English craft comes from Old English cræft, which meant two things at once: skill at making, and strength. The same root gives German Kraft — power. Craft was never meant to be the soft word it has become; it meant being good enough at something that it gave you force.
-ist — one who practises it
The suffix that turns a discipline into a person: machinist, scientist, cyclist. Not someone who admires the thing — someone who does it, daily, as their work. A Kraftonist is a practitioner of craft, and this is a collective of them.
The mark
A block, and the next one above it in outline — drawn in the isometric projection an engineering drawing uses. The solid block is the work: three faces, real volume, standing because somebody made it. The outline is the vision — the layer that has been scoped and agreed but not built yet.
Why it moves
Point at it and the block tilts towards you. Rest on it and the outline fills in — the vision becoming the work, which is the entire proposition in one gesture. On the home page the same idea runs at scale: a lattice sheet with load moving across it, every cell carrying its share and handing it on.
Not sure it is a fit?
That is a reasonable thing to find out before either side commits. Thirty minutes on a call is usually enough to tell.
Tell us what you are trying to build.
A first call is thirty minutes, costs nothing, and ends with a straight answer about whether we are the right group for it — plus the names of the specialists who would actually do the work.