No Middlemen
You talk to the engineer building your product. Decisions happen in an afternoon, not a week, and nothing gets lost in translation.
Senior engineers.
Building with you.
We work with founders directly to ship production software.
You talk to the people writing the code, and pay about a third of agency rates.
why teams choose sonkin
Built carefully,
on purpose.
No layers, no markup — just the people building your product, working with you directly.
Working Software, Every Friday
Weekly sprints with a working demo at the end of each one. Most projects reach a usable v1 in six to ten weeks, and there's something to show every Friday until they do.
Always Within 4 Hours
Engineers across six time zones means at least one is always within four hours of your working day. Questions get answered while they're still fresh, and your evenings stay yours.
Senior Only
Every engineer here has at least five years of production work behind them. We don't keep a bench or a junior pool, so nobody's learning on your timeline.
Picked for Your Project
We hand-match one to three engineers whose stack and shipped work fit what you're building. If we're not the right fit, we'll say so on the first call, and point you to someone who is.
A Stack You Can Live With
TypeScript, Rust, Go, Swift, modern infrastructure. Chosen so the codebase is easy to live with now, and still easy to open three years from now.
how we work
Four steps,
kept simple.
From the first call to a production deploy in weeks, not quarters. The four steps below cover what matters, and skip the rest.
0130 min
Discovery
A 30-minute call. By the end, you'll have a yes, a no, or a referral to someone better suited. No decks or homework, just a conversation.
022–4 days
Pair-match
We hand-pick the one to three senior engineers whose work most closely matches what you're building. You meet them and decide if it's a fit before anything starts.
03weekly
Sprint cycles
Weekly sprints with a working demo every Friday. You're in the same Slack channel as the engineers, with nothing translated through a project manager.
0430 days included
Ship & handoff
Production deploy, full source ownership, complete documentation, and 30 days of support included. After that, we stay on however suits you: hourly, retainer, or just available when you need us.
the union — 06 engineers
The people
you'll be working with.
No sales bench, no junior pool. These are the engineers who'd be on your project, with full names, past employers, and shipped work you can verify yourself.
Kagayami Sōma
Founding engineer · Frontend & systems
Turning vague product ideas into shipped interfaces in two-week loops.
- TypeScript
- Next.js
- Rust
- WebGL
Marta Lindqvist
Senior backend engineer
Designing services that scale before they need to.
- Go
- PostgreSQL
- Kafka
Diego Vargas
Product engineer
Sitting next to founders and turning rough ideas into shipped features.
- React
- Node
- tRPC
Aiko Tanabe
Design engineer
Interfaces people want to touch. Micro-interactions and motion grammar.
- Figma
- Motion
- SCSS
Noah Adeyemi
Infra & DevOps
Boring, predictable infra that wakes nobody up at 3am.
- AWS
- Terraform
- K8s
Eva Schreiber
iOS & Swift
Native apps that feel native, written in Swift.
- Swift
- SwiftUI
- Metal
what clients say
Founders we've
built things with.
Honestly I was ready to give up on the product. We'd paid an agency for five months and had basically nothing. Sonkin's team took over, and eight weeks later we had something I could actually show investors.
I've worked with a lot of contractors. The difference here is you're talking to the person actually writing the code — not someone passing your message down a chain. It sounds small but it changes everything.
I expected a loose group of freelancers. What I got felt more like a small studio — just one that happens to be spread across six time zones. Weirdly the most organized team I've worked with.
NorthwindAtlas LogisticsKiln StudiosFoundry & CoHalcyonPelagoRoamThreadwellNorthwindAtlas LogisticsKiln StudiosFoundry & CoHalcyonPelagoRoamThreadwell
where we work
A team across timezones.
Engineers in nine cities, across six time zones. Every project includes at least one person whose working hours overlap yours by four hours or more, so async work stays async by choice, not by accident.
common questions
Questions we hear
before every project.
These come straight from our inbox. If yours isn't here, send it over. We usually reply within one working day.