Senior product designers operating inside your existing tools, under your delivery lead, and behind your brand — quoted as throughput, not as hours.
Configurable shape, predictable spine
These are the conversations design and full-service agency owners describe when the work is in front of them and the in-house team is already in the middle of something.
A signed SOW with three product surfaces and one designer between four projects. The shape is right; the throughput isn't. The pod absorbs the overflow without the founder picking up Figma at 11pm.
A five-week gap that can't justify a full hire and can't be patched with a freelancer who needs ramp-up. A named pod plugs in inside your tools without a re-introduction to the client.
Components are forked across files, tokens have drifted, and every new screen costs a debate. A focused systems engagement consolidates without freezing live product work.
Chat is not the answer. Real interface work for agents, retrieval results, and review flows — designed by people who have shipped them before and won't reinvent the eight known patterns.
The shape below is the default for an Invisible Delivery Team SOW with UI/UX as the lead capability. Overflow Pods compress this into a tighter window; Capability Expansion adds a capability lead on top.
Working session with your delivery lead and product owner. We pressure-test the brief, agree the working model in your Figma + Notion + Linear, and set the daily / weekly rhythm. NDA and SOW signed under Salt Technologies, Inc.
Stakeholder calls, competitor and pattern review, content inventory, and the information architecture that determines whether the rest of the engagement ships in three sprints or seven.
Wireframes, then hi-fi UI in your design-system file. Weekly working review with named owners on both sides. Prototypes go in Figma; usability checks happen in Loom or Lookback before engineering picks anything up.
Annotated handoff, component docs, and a named designer staying close to engineering through implementation — so 'designed' and 'shipped' don't quietly diverge after the Figma file goes quiet.
UI/UX runs across the same three engagement shapes every capability uses. Pricing is anchored to the same weekly capability rate; the difference is the cadence around it.
Designer pod inside your SOW
Active client work that has been sold and now needs design throughput inside your shared channel — long-arc, structured, named delivery owner.
1–4 week burst capacity
Stretched team with a tight deadline. Spin up in days, scope per engagement, weekly billing, no multi-month commitment.
Capability lead + delivery support
Standing UI/UX up as a defensible new service line on your rate card — capability lead, pricing template, monthly retainer.
Starting rate for a single-capability designer pod. Multi-capability pods are quoted at the highest applicable rate. Final SOW is scoped against the brief.
We operate inside the tooling your team already uses — no migration, no parallel design system, no "we'll send you a Sketch file" surprise.
UI/UX as a capability shows up in almost every partnership we run, but these three agency profiles are where it's most often the lead.
Boutique design and product studios using AgencyRelay as a senior designer pod when the roadmap outpaces the in-house team — without taking on the fixed cost of a third or fourth permanent senior.
HubSpot partners shipping product surfaces and AI-driven workflows for clients — where the stack ends and the design work for a real interface begins.
Shopify partners adding storefront, app, and headless product surfaces that need design throughput beyond theme tweaks — without inheriting a design hire on the bench.
Every UI/UX engagement runs on the same operating spine that protects long-arc retainers and Dedicated Partner Pods — contracted through Salt Technologies, Inc.
We don't email your client, join their calls, or appear in the proposal — unless you explicitly white-list a named designer in the SOW.
Standups, design reviews, and async updates run inside your Slack or Teams workspace under aliases that fit your team's naming.
Mutual non-solicitation written into every MSA, with a defined window after the engagement ends. Same clause across every track.
MSA, NDA, and engagement SOW are issued by Salt — the Delaware C-Corp behind AgencyRelay.
The same operating spine sits underneath every AgencyRelay capability. Read the no-poach and confidentiality page for the contractual instruments behind these defaults.
Most agency owners deciding between a UI/UX pod and a fresh designer hire are weighing the same trade-offs. These pages address them head-on.
When a designer pod is cheaper, faster, and lower-risk than the next senior hire — and when staffing up is the right call.
The most common pairing for UI/UX work — design throughput plus the engineering bench that turns the Figma file into a shipped surface.
When the brief asks for an interface around agents, RAG, or workflow automation — not a chat box.
Direct answers to the questions that come up on almost every UI/UX scoping call.
Senior. Every UI/UX engagement is staffed with product designers who have shipped real surfaces inside agencies and product companies — not a junior pool with a senior badge in the project channel. If continuity is ever at risk on a long-arc engagement, we tell you before the next sprint review.
Yes — that is the default. We work inside your Figma file, your token set, and your component library. If the system needs consolidation as part of the engagement, that's scoped explicitly into the SOW, not done quietly in the background.
Typically a 1-week Overflow Pods burst is the floor — anything shorter doesn't get past kickoff cleanly. For long-arc work, the most common starting shape is a single-designer pod inside an Invisible Delivery Team SOW, sized around the live brief.
Not by default. Standups, reviews, and async updates run inside your shared channel. If a co-delivery setup makes sense for the account — for example a named designer joining a research session — the exception is written into the SOW addendum up-front, never improvised mid-engagement.
Research-led discovery, lightweight usability testing, and stakeholder synthesis are part of the default scope. Standalone qualitative or quantitative research programs sit outside the UI/UX capability — point us at those briefs and we'll route them through Capability Expansion if the volume justifies it.
The starting weekly rate for a single-capability UI/UX pod is $2,200 per week. Multi-capability pods — for example UI/UX plus Frontend Development — are quoted at the highest applicable capability rate. Final SOW is scoped against the brief; the rate is the floor, not a ceiling.
Most pods grow inside the same MSA — either by extending the existing SOW window, adding an adjacent capability (Frontend Development is the most common), or graduating into Capability Expansion if UI/UX is becoming a defensible new line on your rate card.
Yes. IP ownership and assignment on delivered work is written into the MSA — the work belongs to your agency (and onwards to your client per your own client contract) on payment of the relevant invoice. The Salt Technologies templates are counsel-reviewed and shared before signing.
Single designer pod, multi-capability with frontend, or a capability lead to stand UI/UX up as a new service line. Either way, the conversation starts with the work — not with a deck.
