White-Label Development for Agencies
Your clients think it's your team. We build behind the scenes - websites, platforms, AI features - so you can take on more work without more hires.
White-label web development is the engineering execution your agency sells to its clients, delivered under your brand by an outside team you trust. The agencies Borah Labs partners with bring the strategy, design, account management, and the client relationship; we bring senior engineers, project leadership, code review, QA, and accountability. We work in your Slack, use your project management tool, write status updates in your voice, and never appear on a client call without your invitation. A typical white-label engagement starts as a fixed-scope project ($8,500-$25,000) or a monthly retainer ($5,000-$14,000/month) and covers websites in WordPress / Webflow / Shopify, custom platforms in Laravel and Next.js, AI feature builds, and ongoing client portfolio maintenance. We've been a white-label partner for US and European agencies for four-plus years (notably Mabbly, a Chicago marketing agency we ship under) and our retention rate among agency partners is 90%+. The pitch we make to agency owners is simple: stop turning away work, stop building a recruiting pipeline, stop discovering on a Friday that your senior dev quit. Use us instead.
Trusted by
Who this is for
Built for teams with one of these problems.
If your situation looks like one of these three, you'll feel at home with us.
Branding & design agencies, marketing agencies, web design studios, content agencies
Founder of a 5-30 person digital, design, or marketing agency
Sells web, brand, and marketing work but has no in-house senior dev capacity beyond a junior or two — or none at all. Wants to expand the offering to platforms, custom builds, and AI features without hiring an entire engineering function. Often discovers us when a strategic client asks for something the existing team can't deliver.
Mid-market marketing agencies, brand consultancies, digital transformation shops
Operations or delivery lead at a 30-100 person agency
Has in-house engineering but is staffed for steady-state and not for surge. Needs an external partner who can take a 6-week build off the team's plate, an entire client portfolio of WordPress maintenance, or the AI-feature buildouts the in-house team isn't trained for. Cares deeply about the partner not breaking client relationships.
Solo designers, fractional CMOs, brand consultants
Independent designer or strategist with a single big client
Won a project bigger than their current setup can deliver alone. Needs the engineering arm of an agency without becoming an agency. Wants project leadership, accountability, and someone they can hand the build to without micromanaging while they own the strategy and the relationship.
Sound familiar?
- You're turning down profitable projects every month because your in-house dev team is maxed out, and the gap between sales pipeline and delivery capacity keeps widening.
- Freelancers ghost mid-project, offshore teams need more management than they save, and the quality bar swings wildly between hires — meanwhile your clients expect senior-level work every time.
- You need consistent senior-level development without paying $180-$240K + benefits for a US senior, and without the recruiting timeline of three to six months per hire.
How we solve it
- A dedicated white-label team that works under your brand — same Slack, same project tool, same status report cadence, invisible to your clients. Senior engineering with an agency-aware project manager.
- Consistent communication and quality. Four-plus years partnering with US and European agencies, code review on every PR, QA before delivery, and SLAs you can confidently quote to your own clients.
- Flexible capacity that scales with your pipeline. Spin up an extra team for a big launch, scale down between projects, no long-term commitment, no payroll exposure when the pipeline dips.
What you get
Deliverables, with sample artifacts.
Concrete outputs you can expect from this engagement — and a sample of what each one looks like.
Website Development
Custom websites built to your design specs in WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, headless CMS, or fully custom Next.js / Laravel — whatever your client needs and whatever your agency standardizes on. Includes responsive build, performance optimization to Core Web Vitals targets, accessibility passes, CMS training for the client, and a launch checklist your account team uses.
Sample artifact
A staging environment shared via your subdomain, a launch checklist with sign-offs, and a 30-day post-launch warranty for bug fixes — all under your agency name.
Platform Development
Full-stack platforms, client portals, custom dashboards, internal tools, and web applications that go beyond what most agencies can deliver in-house. Auth, role-based access, payment integration, third-party API integration, admin panels — the kind of build that wins big retainer clients but breaks small dev teams.
Sample artifact
A working platform deployed to your client's infrastructure, architecture documentation, a runbook for common operations, and a knowledge-transfer session with whoever will own it post-launch.
AI Feature Development
Add chatbots, content generation, intelligent search, document summarization, lead qualification bots, or workflow automation to your client projects without building an AI practice in-house. We design, build, ship, and instrument the AI feature so your agency can offer it as a service line — and price it accordingly.
Sample artifact
A working AI feature shipped into your client's stack, an evaluation set proving accuracy, a cost dashboard, and a pricing memo your agency can use to package similar work for future clients.
Ongoing Development Support
Retainer-based development support across your entire client portfolio. Bug fixes, feature additions, security patching, monthly performance and SEO health passes, and incident response when something breaks at 9pm. One contract, one invoice, dozens of client sites covered.
Sample artifact
A monthly portfolio report your account team can forward to clients, a shared task queue your PMs prioritize, and a uptime/issues dashboard you have visibility into without paging us.
Tech stack
The tools we ship with.
Battle-tested, boring where it should be, modern where it earns it.
Laravel
React
Next.js
WordPress
Shopify
TypeScript
OpenAI
AWS
Process
Week by week — what shipping looks like.
A typical engagement, end to end. Concrete deliverables every milestone.
Week 1
Onboarding & playbook
- Two-hour kickoff with your agency leadership: how you communicate with clients, what your delivery standards look like, what your brand voice sounds like in writing.
- We join your Slack, your Linear / Asana / Monday, your Notion or Confluence, and your Google Drive. We adopt your tooling, not the other way around.
- Sign mutual NDA and a master services agreement so individual projects can move on a single page of paperwork.
- Document the agency playbook — naming conventions, branch strategy, status report cadence, escalation rules — and lock the SLAs.
Weeks 2-3
First project pilot
- Take a small first project — a WordPress build, a Shopify customization, a one-feature add — and ship it end-to-end under your brand.
- PR-level code review and QA before anything reaches the client. Status reports to your PM in your voice on your cadence.
- Calibration sessions with your team: are we matching your house style, your communication tempo, your level of polish?
- Lock the working agreement: ticket flow, weekly demo cadence, who attends client calls (usually nobody from us).
Weeks 4-6
Scale to portfolio
- Roll the working agreement out to additional projects on your pipeline — typically two to four concurrent engagements after the pilot.
- Standing weekly leadership sync between our engineering lead and your delivery lead: pipeline forecast, capacity planning, risks.
- Migrate any legacy / urgent maintenance work into the shared retainer queue.
- Quarterly reviews of partnership health, with a review of pricing if the volume justifies a different commercial structure.
Ongoing
Steady-state partnership
- Monthly capacity forecasting so you can quote confidently in sales calls without dialing us first.
- Senior engineer continuity — your account doesn't get bounced between people quarter-to-quarter.
- Standing improvement loop on the playbook: what's working, what's friction, what we should change next quarter.
- Direct access to our leadership for any client-facing escalation, with a four-hour response SLA.
Featured plan · Monthly
Growth
Recommended starting point for white-label development for agencies. Retainers from $5,000/mo.
- ~70 dev hours/month
- Everything in Standard
- Priority task queue
- AI integration work included
- Bi-weekly strategy call
- 24h response time
Choosing a stack
When to pick what — and when to skip it.
The honest version. Real trade-offs, not marketing slideware.
WordPress vs custom Next.js for client websites
When to use
WordPress (or Webflow) when the client team needs to edit content daily, when SEO is the primary outcome, when budget is sensible, and when the templated patterns of a CMS-backed site are enough. Most marketing-led websites still belong here.
When to avoid
Custom Next.js when you need a level of design freedom, performance, or interactivity that a CMS can't deliver, or when the site is really an application disguised as marketing. Don't pick custom for a 6-page brochure site — you'll regret it for years of maintenance.
Shopify vs custom commerce
See RLC Solutions →When to use
Shopify (with a custom theme or Hydrogen storefront) for almost every DTC ecommerce build. The platform handles payments, inventory, shipping, and tax in ways nobody should reimplement, and the agency margin per build is healthier.
When to avoid
Custom commerce only when the business model is genuinely outside Shopify's box — multi-vendor marketplaces, B2B with complex pricing rules, hardware-tied products with strange configurators. Even then, prefer Shopify Plus with extensions before going fully custom.
Hire a senior in-house vs white-label
When to use
Hire in-house when you have steady-state demand for one stack, when culture and continuity matter more than flexibility, and when the work pipeline justifies $200K+ in fully-loaded annual cost reliably for the next two years.
When to avoid
White-label is the right call when demand is spiky, when you need multi-stack coverage (one project is WordPress, the next is Laravel, the third is React Native), or when you want to test an engineering practice without committing to a permanent hire. Most agencies under 25 people are firmly in this bucket.
Agency-of-record vs project-by-project
See Mabbly →When to use
Lock us in as your agency-of-record on a monthly retainer when you've done two or three pilots and want predictable capacity, faster turnaround, lower per-project paperwork, and better commercial terms. Most of our long-running agency partnerships sit here.
When to avoid
Project-by-project is fine to start with — and often the right way to validate the partnership — but the friction adds up after three or four engagements. Move to a retainer once you trust the team.
Real shipped work
Production case studies, not pitch decks.
Two engagements that mirror the kind of work you'd hand us.
FAQ
Common questions
Everything you need to know about our white-label development for agencies services.
No. We work entirely under your brand, in your tooling, with email signatures from your domain when needed. Your clients see your team. We never join a client call without your explicit invitation, never reach out to your clients directly, and our agency partnerships are confidential. The only people who know we exist are the people on your side of the table you decide to tell.
We join your Slack workspace, use your project management tool (Asana, Linear, ClickUp, Monday — whatever you've standardized on), and follow your reporting cadence. We adapt to your processes, not the other way around. Status reports go in your voice and your format. If you have a house style for client comms, we learn it and stay inside it.
We can spin up additional senior resources within 48 hours for partners on a retainer, and within five business days for new projects. Our team is structured around flexible capacity — we maintain bench engineers specifically so partners can promise tight timelines and have us deliver. Surge work is built into the retainer model and doesn't require a new contract.
Yes. We have volume-based pricing for agencies with recurring monthly work, and project-based pricing for one-off engagements. The standard structure is a monthly retainer ($5,000 / $8,500 / $14,000) covering an agreed hours allocation across your portfolio, with overage billed at a transparent senior or junior rate. Contact us for a custom agency rate based on expected monthly volume.
Yes. We currently manage 4-12 concurrent client projects across multiple agency partners at any given time, with dedicated leads per project to make sure nothing slips. Capacity planning is part of our monthly leadership sync with you so we know what's coming six to eight weeks ahead and you know exactly what we can absorb.
Our retainer agreements include a defined escalation path — engineering lead, delivery lead, leadership — with four-hour response SLAs on anything tagged urgent. If a project is genuinely going wrong, we want to know early so we can fix it before your client does. We've never lost an agency partner over a project blow-up because we surface the problem proactively, not when it's a fire.
Yes — every agency partnership starts with a mutual NDA and an IP-assignment master services agreement. All work product is owned by your agency (or your client, depending on your contract structure), no portfolio rights, no public attribution unless you specifically authorize it. Our SOC-2 security posture and DPA are available on request for clients in regulated industries.
Our depth is in Laravel, Next.js, React, TypeScript, WordPress, Shopify (Liquid + Hydrogen), and AI / LLM work (OpenAI, Anthropic, LangChain, RAG). We have lighter coverage on Vue, Nuxt, Webflow, and Python / Django when projects call for it. If a partner consistently asks for a stack outside our core, we either upskill (with the partner's awareness) or we recommend a different team for that specific project.
Three differences agencies notice immediately. First, project leadership: every engagement gets a senior engineer plus an agency-aware project manager — you don't manage individual contributors, you manage one team. Second, communication standard: we write status reports the way your clients expect, in English, in your tone. Third, accountability: when something breaks, we own it and fix it on our time, not yours. The hourly rate is higher than offshore but the total cost — including the management time you save — is usually lower.
Ready to ship white-label development for agencies?
Tell us what you need. We will scope it, price it, and give you a timeline - all before you commit to anything.
No commitment. No sales pitch. Just a clear plan.