I'm currently working for a UN-agency as a contractor, and my team is modelled in a similar way, like a private development agency so to speak (calling us and 1

I'm currently working for a UN-agency as a contractor, and my team is modelled in a similar way, like a private development agency so to speak (calling us and 18F a startup is a bit click-baity IMO). We only work internally for our agency, not the whole UN, but there are structures like that too - e.g. ICC provide ISP and hosting services to the whole UN. I'd imagine it's a fairly common structure in large companies/organisations. Anyway, whenever a department wants a new IT project they have the choice of releasing a tender to the public or going to us. We then work like an agency, providing an estimate, then billing them for X days of development. The first bit where it gets tricky for us, and I'd imagine 18F, is the specs usually aren't clear. Customers decide they want something different, didn't explain what they wanted properly, or something just takes longer than you estimated. Unlike an agency we have to deal with the code and people for a long time, so we can't just say "no you only payed for X days work" and leave something broken. The other part is maintenance - that is paid for by our internal budget, but as with any software projects there are always tweaks/changes that need to be done. Unfortunately the level of beuracracy is quite high, so getting budget for something that is say 3 days work is more effort than it's worth, so it often just comes out of our budget. Anyway, even if we lose money I think it's a lot better for us to do this than an external agency. For starters an external agency would be a magnitude more expensive. As we know all our systems we can recommend and build systems that are more integrated with each other, where as an external agency would just build one system in isolation as per the spec. I'd imagine it's similar for 18F. Our design decisions are Bootstrap for everything, so no we aren't spending a crazy number of hours on just a logo :-)