Hire full-time
A senior frontend engineer costs £60,000–£90,000/year plus benefits, onboarding, and the risk that the product changes so fast the hire isn't right 6 months later.
Too expensive and too slow to start. Wrong for pre-PMF.
About Hardlite
A senior developer you can work with directly.
Hardlite is a one-person frontend studio run by Szymon Kubisa — a senior full-stack developer specialising in Vue, Nuxt, and TypeScript. No account managers. No juniors doing the work. Just clean, fast code delivered async.
The founder
Built by someone who's shipped real products.
I'm Szymon — a London-based senior frontend developer with 10+ years of experience building products for startups, scale-ups, and enterprise teams. I've worked across the full stack, but frontend is where I'm most effective: Vue 3, Nuxt 3, TypeScript, Tailwind, Firebase, Supabase, and the integrations that make products actually useful.
I started Hardlite because I kept seeing the same problem: founders needed senior frontend work, but agencies were too slow and too expensive, and freelancers were too unpredictable. A subscription model — fixed monthly, async delivery, no meetings — solves all three.
When you work with Hardlite, you're working with me. Not an account manager who relays instructions to a junior. Not an offshore team I've coordinated over Slack. Just a senior developer who understands your product and gets the work done.
Senior developer
Szymon Kubisa
London · 10+ years exp.
Why Hardlite exists
The three bad options you're choosing between.
Before working with Hardlite, most clients had already tried one of these. Here's why each falls short for continuous product development.
Use an agency
Agencies add discovery phases, project management overhead, change request cycles, and often bill £5,000–£50,000 for a project you need to iterate on constantly.
Designed for fixed-scope projects, not continuous iteration.
Hire freelancers
Quality varies enormously. Availability is unpredictable. The context-switching cost of managing multiple freelancers is high, and no one owns the bigger picture.
Unpredictable quality. No continuity. No accountability.
How we work
Async, transparent, no surprises.
Everything happens on a shared Notion board. You add tasks, I work through them one at a time, and you get a delivered preview or Loom walkthrough when each is done. No status meetings. No "what's the latest?" messages. Just work, delivered.
Revisions are unlimited per task. If something isn't right, you leave feedback on the board and I revise it. The task stays in progress until you're satisfied.
You can pause or cancel your subscription at any time. No notice period, no penalties, no awkward "we need to talk" conversations. This model only works if it's genuinely valuable to you — so there's no reason to lock you in.
Senior work, senior accountability
Everything is written by a senior developer with full-stack context — not reviewed by one and written by another.
Async by default
No required calls, no status updates, no coordination overhead. You get more code and less meeting time.
Transparent and direct
I'll tell you if your scope is too large, if a feature is a bad idea, or if there's a simpler way to solve the problem.
Predictable, controllable cost
One fixed monthly number. Pause when there's nothing to build. No invoice surprises, no change order negotiations.
Technical background
The stack, and why it matters.
Every technical decision I make is optimised for startup speed. Here's the core stack and the reasoning behind it.
Vue 3 + Nuxt 3
The fastest path from idea to working product for a small senior team. Less boilerplate, better SSR, and file-based routing that just works.
TypeScript strict
Catches bugs at write time instead of runtime. Every project starts with strict TypeScript — it's not optional, it's a quality guarantee.
Firebase / Supabase
Managed backends that remove infrastructure from your critical path. The right choice for 90% of MVPs and early-stage products.
Tailwind CSS
Design-system-first styling that scales. No CSS sprawl. Consistent spacing, colours, and typography from day one.
Want to work together?
Drop me a message with what you're building. I'll tell you honestly whether Hardlite is a good fit, and if not, point you somewhere better.
Starting from £2,500/month · No minimum contract · Cancel anytime