Node.js Development in the US

If you are consumer facing in the US, build as though it does. Demand letters over inaccessible websites are routine and cheap to send, federal work brings Section 508 with it, and the Department of Justice rule under Title II sets WCAG 2.1 AA for state and local government entities on a timetable your counsel can confirm for your size band. We work to WCAG 2.2 AA and test with a screen reader rather than relying on an automated scan, because automated tools catch perhaps a third of real issues and the other two thirds are the ones that end up in a letter.

Nobody can promise you that, and a supplier who does is selling something. We have been building since 2021 and we maintain what we build, which is the honest version of the answer. The useful version is that it should not have to matter. The repository is in your GitHub organization, the domain and hosting accounts are in your company name, the stack is Next.js, Laravel, Flutter and Postgres rather than anything only we can read, and the handover document exists before you ask for it. If we vanished tomorrow, another agency could pick it up without needing to call us.

Yes to the NDA. Send your standard one and it comes back signed within 24 hours, before you describe the project in any detail. Yes to the MSA too, with the caveat that we read it properly rather than signing to be agreeable. The two clauses we usually come back on are unlimited liability, where we ask for a cap tied to the fees, and an IP clause drafted broadly enough to sweep in the internal tooling we bring to every project. Everything built for you transfers to you in full on final payment. We mark up those two and sign the rest.

Two in the afternoon in Chicago is past midnight here, half past midnight in summer and half past one in winter, so the truthful answer depends on what you are paying for. Monitoring does not keep our hours and the alert fires whatever the clock says. Whether a person is awake to act on it depends on your plan, because we are not a 24/7 on-call operation as standard, and we would rather tell you that while you are choosing a plan than while your checkout is down. Without out-of-hours cover written into the contract, the realistic answer is that it is picked up at the start of our day, which is the middle of your night, and you should price that in when you decide.

Starter APIs (10-30 endpoints, basic auth, Postgres): $460-$1,100. Production backends (GraphQL, real-time, jobs, complex data): $1,100-$3,400. Multi-service / enterprise: $3,400+. Cost scales with endpoint count, real-time complexity, and observability requirements.

NestJS for projects expected to grow past 10-15 contributors or 50+ endpoints, its opinionated structure pays back. Plain Express + custom architecture for smaller projects, MVPs, and tight deadlines. We use both regularly and pick per project.

REST when consumers are first-party (your own front-end, your own mobile app), the data model is simple, and you don't need flexible querying. GraphQL when you have multiple front-ends with different data needs, complex nested relationships, or third-party API consumers. Most of our recent backends are REST, GraphQL is over-applied for projects that don't need it.

Yes. We build full-stack, Node.js backend + React Native or Flutter mobile app + admin dashboard. One team, one codebase repository, one PM. Most clients prefer this over splitting backend/mobile across two vendors.

Honest answer: monoliths win for ~80% of projects. We only recommend microservices when there's a specific reason, compliance/data isolation, independent scaling needs, or genuine team/codebase size that justifies the operational overhead. Anyone telling early-stage startups to start with microservices is selling complexity.