The person who quotes it builds it
No account manager, no handover from a sales meeting to a delivery team. Whatever is promised on the call is promised by the person who then has to do it, which changes what gets promised.
About
Small studio. Senior everything.
Who is behind Qanat?
Qanat was founded by Alexandre Arnaud, a practising CTO based in Dubai. It is a deliberately small studio of senior engineers — no juniors billed at senior rates, no account managers between you and the work. The person who scopes and quotes your project is the person who builds it.
- Based
- Dubai
- Founded
- 2026
- Team
- Senior only
- Pricing
- Fixed
United Arab Emirates
Deliberately small
Never hourly
What we build withAWSClaudeClerkConvexdbtExpoFastlaneFirebaseKotlinLangGraphLaravelLegacy PHPMedusaMetabasen8nNetwork InternationalNext.jsNode.jsOpenAIPostgreSQLPostHogPythonReactReact NativeRetoolShopifyStripeSwiftTailwindTwilioTypeScriptVector databasesVercelWebhooksWhatsApp Business APIWordPressZapierZoho
The founder
Alexandre Arnaud
Founder & Engineer
- Writes the code
- On every Qanat project
- Day job
- CTO, Dubai B2B platform
- Reachable at
- hello@qanat.ae
Practising CTO of a Dubai B2B platform. Writes the code on Qanat projects rather than managing someone who does. Running an engineering team in the UAE means having been on both sides of this transaction: buying software from agencies, and building the thing they were supposed to deliver after they did not.
Qanat exists because the failure pattern is consistent and fixable. Projects go wrong when the person selling has no exposure to the build, when the price is an estimate nobody is accountable for, and when the client cannot leave without losing the work. Each of those is a commercial choice, not a technical one.
So the studio is structured against all three. It stays small, which is a real limit on how much we take on — and the reason we will tell you if we are not the right fit rather than fitting you in badly.
How we operate
Four commitments, each of which costs us something.
Fixed price, not hourly
Hourly billing pays us more when we are slower. A fixed price agreed before work starts puts the risk of a bad estimate on us, where it can actually be controlled.
You own everything, always
Repository in your organisation from the first commit, cloud and store accounts in your name, IP assigned in the contract. If leaving us is expensive, we have built the wrong incentive into the relationship.
We say no
To projects we would do badly, to AI that will not pay for itself, and to builds where an off-the-shelf product fits better. Every page on this site names who the thing is wrong for.
What we turn down
Four asks that get a no, and the reason each time.
- “Can you just add AI to it?”
- Not until there is a task worth automating and a number attached to it. Most AI features we are asked for cost more to run than the work they replace.
- “Build it now, we will scope it as we go.”
- No — not at a fixed price. Undefined scope at a fixed price produces either padding or an argument. Take the two-week sprint and come back with a scope.
- “Match the cheapest quote we have.”
- No. If a quote is materially lower, something in it is missing. We will tell you what, in writing, and you can take that list to them instead.
- “We need six workstreams running in parallel.”
- Wrong studio. A senior team of this size runs one or two builds properly. A fifty-person agency is the right answer and we will say so.
On being small
The honest limitation.
A small senior studio cannot do everything a fifty-person agency can. We cannot run six workstreams in parallel, we cannot staff a two-year programme, and there are weeks where the answer is that we have no capacity until next month.
What you get in exchange is that nobody on your project is learning on your budget, and the person who told you it would work is the one who has to make it work. For most projects under a million dirhams, that trade is worth making — and when it is not, we will tell you.
Start here
Got something that needs building?
A scope call, then a written scope and one fixed price against it. 20% of that price is held back until you accept the finished build, and the scope is yours to take elsewhere either way.
- Who reads it
- Alexandre Arnaud, Founder & Engineer. Not a coordinator, not an inbox.
- What happens
- A 20-minute call to pin the outcome, then a written scope and one fixed price against it.
- What it costs
- Nothing to get scoped and quoted. The quote is free and the scope is yours to take elsewhere.