FAQ — Cloud Mist Labs

A 30-minute intro call (free, no slides). If we feel like a fit, we send a written proposal within 5 business days. The proposal includes scope, calendar, and price. From there it's a 2-week Discovery, then the full build. No fixed-bid builds without Discovery.

The 2-week Discovery is our floor. We don't do hourly consulting, one-off sprints, or "just take a look" engagements. If your problem is smaller than two weeks of work, we'll point you to someone whose model fits better.

No. We work as a three-person team, or not at all. If a project genuinely only needs one person, it's not the right project for us.

Yes — mutual NDAs as a matter of course. We don't sign one-way NDAs that bind us without binding you. Our standard NDA is two pages; happy to use yours if it's reasonable.

Currently booking Q3 2026. We don't take rush engagements. If urgency is the primary qualification, we're probably not the right firm.

Monthly retainer for the team during a Full Build, plus a fixed fee for Discovery and AI Readiness. We don't publish rates publicly because every engagement is scoped individually. We do publish ranges in proposals.

We bill in AED by default, USD on request. Either is fine.

No. Cash only. Every engagement we take is a cash engagement; we don't plan to change that.

We'll review and red-line yours, or send ours. Either is fine. We won't agree to indemnification clauses we can't insure against, or to non-competes that limit our practice.

30-day notice on either side after the first signed checkpoint. Discovery engagements are not cancellable mid-stream — they're two weeks, fixed fee, fully paid even if you decide not to proceed to build.

Phases in order, not strata in order. We scope, design, build, ship, and hand off — each phase has a beginning, an end, and a signed handoff. Inside a phase we work across all three strata as the project demands.

Both, but the centre of gravity is writing code. Around 80% of an engagement is hands-on; 20% is advisory and reviews. Pure advisory work is the Advisory shape (quarterly retainer) — we don't mix the two inside one engagement.

Alongside. We work as a third party at the table, not as embedded contractors. Your engineers stay yours; we don't replace them.

Every production deploy is signed by the engineer who shipped it and reviewed by another. The signature is an audit trail and a discipline — it adds about 90 seconds to a deploy and removes a category of mistake. (See /cml for the tooling roadmap.)

Weekly written status (Friday, plain text). Monthly signed checkpoint document. Slack/Teams/WhatsApp for day-to-day, whatever your team uses. No standups unless your team runs them and we're joining.

Not currently. We're three people by design — Ghaith, Fatema, and Saeed — and we don't plan to scale past five. If we open a role, it lands on the Careers page first, not on a job board.

Dubai. All three of us. We travel for kickoffs and cutovers; the rest is remote.

English by default. Arabic for client conversations, contracts, and Arabic-language interfaces. We don't do French / Hindi / Tagalog client work in those languages — happy to refer.

We don't consult on it, and we don't perform it. Our team is what it is; the people we work with are people we like working with.

You do, on payment. Standard work-for-hire in the SOW. Anything we wrote before the engagement (our templates, our internal tools) stays ours, and you get a perpetual licence to use it within your business.

Only with your sign-off, and only the parts that make sense. Our default is closed; we ask before we publish anything from an engagement.

A document the team can own when we leave: architecture notes, runbooks, ADR log, contact info, known-unknowns, suggested next 90 days. Hand-bound, printed and signed for your team. 60 days of post-handoff reachability included, no clock.

Yes. We deliver client-facing interfaces in Arabic when required — RTL layouts, locale-aware typography, Arabic-first content where the audience needs it. Documentation, contracts, and internal artefacts can be bilingual on request.

Yes. We design and build with bilingual support in mind from the architecture phase, not bolted on at the end. Includes RTL UI, language switching, Arabic search, and Arabic-safe data handling.

Depends on the engagement. For UI copy and product strings, we draft and review internally (one of us is bilingual). For long-form legal or marketing content, we work with a vetted Arabic translator and review for voice.

Yes, when required. Bilingual contracts (English/Arabic) are standard for UAE government and many enterprise clients. We can work with your legal team's preferred bilingual format.

Yes. We're set up for procurement-driven buyers — named engagement shapes, fixed-fee phases, signed handoffs, bilingual deliverables. We can work as a prime or alongside a larger integrator.

We've worked across mainland UAE. For ADGM- or DIFC-specific work we engage local counsel on contractual matters and follow your team's procurement process. We don't pretend to be a free-zone specialist when we aren't.

Yes. We work within UAE data residency requirements when the engagement calls for it — UAE-region cloud deployments, on-premise where needed, locale-aware data handling. We'll be explicit about residency implications in the Discovery phase.

We follow standard security practice (signed deploys, audit trails, principle of least access, encryption at rest + in transit). For specific UAE government cybersecurity standards (NESA, SIA, sector-specific), we engage a specialist consultant. We don't pretend to clearance levels we don't hold.

We'll respond to RFPs that fit our shape. We're small — we won't compete on price against integrators with 200 engineers, and we don't pretend we can scale on demand. If the RFP is a fit, we respond within the deadline with a written proposal.

Sometimes. Pre-product-market-fit isn't a fit; we do best with companies that already have engineers or a clear technical roadmap. We turn down most early-stage work.

Yes. We work across the GCC and have done work for European and US clients remotely. Time-zone overlap of at least 3 hours with Dubai is the practical floor.

We'll say so on the first call and recommend two firms we trust. We get this wrong sometimes — early-stage misfits are the most common. Better to say no fast than be wrong slow.