Frequently Asked Questions

Yes, though we're upfront about timing. We're typically booked two to four months out, but that rarely means waiting around: we can kick off the parts that come first (definition, UI/UX, architecture and frontend) while the backend team frees up. We're also refreshingly quick with the paperwork. Drop us a line and we'll confirm availability within 24 hours.

A dedicated team of senior engineers, with 10+ years of experience on average. No juniors learning on your budget, no bait-and-switch, no offshore subcontracting. You'll meet the whole team before we kick off, and the same people stay with you from discovery to production. We do rotate engineers every 12 to 18 months to keep things fresh, but only ever by mutual agreement, and plenty of Martians stay on a project far longer when it suits everyone.

That's exactly what Sprint Zero is for. It's a fixed-price discovery sprint, one to four weeks, where we define the architecture, prioritise the backlog and hand you a realistic delivery plan. You go into development with the scope clear and the nasty surprises designed out, because we don't start building what hasn't been defined.

Beyond Sprint Zero, we work either time-and-materials with monthly billing, or on a fixed bid. Rates depend on the size of the team and the length of the engagement. There are no hidden fees and no bank-of-hours games: you get full visibility of where every hour goes, and if anything threatens the budget you'll hear it from us straight away, in our weekly report, not at invoice time.

You do: 100% of the intellectual property and the code, from day one, exactly as set out in our contract. We'll sign an NDA before any serious conversation; confidentiality is simply how we operate at MarsBased, not a bargaining chip. We're an EU company, fully GDPR-compliant, and we never subcontract your work to third parties without your consent.

Heavily, and deliberately. AI is woven into how we build, on top of a methodology we've battle-tested over the years rather than bolted on for the hype. We use AI tooling across the whole delivery workflow to iterate faster and ship fewer bugs, and we build AI into products too: LLM integrations, autonomous agents and MCP servers for the clients who want them. Under the hood we follow the Research-Plan-Implement (RPI) methodology, with our own twist.

Of course. We're happy to put you in touch with references from projects similar to yours. You can also browse our public case studies to get a feel for the kind of work we do and the companies we've teamed up with over the years.

With transparency, mostly. Weekly reports, shared roadmaps and a clear change-request process mean nothing drifts in silence. If the scope moves or something puts the timeline at risk, you'll know the moment we do, not when the invoice lands. We'd always rather have the awkward conversation early than spring a surprise at the end.

Not yet, but we're well on our way. We're currently going through the ISO/IEC 27001 certification process, with completion expected in Q3 2026. In the meantime our security practices already line up with the standard: information security has been part of how we work for a long time.

We keep teams small, senior and cross-functional. Our minimum commitment is one full-time engineer per project, with a Tech Lead and a Product Manager layered on part-time, each dedicating a fraction of a 40-hour week. A UI/UX designer joins when the work calls for it. You always have one clear point of contact, and we shape the team around your project rather than forcing your project into a fixed template.

Very flexible, within sensible limits. We staff in whole, full-time people rather than loose hours, so you scale by adding or releasing engineers, usually with about a month's notice. We can reinforce the team for an intensive push and ease back once things settle. Because our engineers are full-stack-minded and we document from day one, people can join or roll off without the project losing its stride.

Yes, within reason. If your product takes off, we can bring in more senior engineers from our own team and our trusted network. What we won't do is throw bodies at the problem: we'd rather add the right people at a sustainable pace than put your codebase or our quality at risk. And because we design architecture-first, it's usually the system, not just the team, that's ready to handle the growth.

We're remote-first by nature, so slotting into your team is second nature too. We live in Slack, Linear and GitHub, and we'll happily adapt to the tools you already use. We join your standups, follow your code-review and branching conventions, and default to working in the open: shared roadmaps, weekly written reports, cameras on for calls, and direct access to the engineers doing the work. No account-manager playing telephone. Whether we're your whole team or an extension of an existing one, you'll always know where things stand.

You get senior European engineering talent at rates that stay highly competitive with the rest of Western Europe and North America, from a city with a deep pool of tech and design talent. We work in CET/CEST (comfortable overlap with the rest of Europe and a solid morning window with the Americas) and we're fully bilingual in English and Spanish. Being EU-based means GDPR and European data protection come as standard, not as an add-on. We've also been part of Barcelona's startup and tech community since 2014, so we're well connected. And yes, it's a rather nice place to come and visit your team.

As an EU company, GDPR isn't an afterthought for us, it's the baseline. We're glad to sign a Data Processing Agreement (DPA) and any NDAs before data changes hands, and we sign everything digitally so it's quick. We keep data within the EU wherever we can, apply least-privilege access as a matter of course, and build systems with data protection and security by default. For projects with stricter requirements, our practices already align with ISO/IEC 27001, which we expect to be certified for in Q3 2026.