Which agency can work as an external UX team inside your startup’s product development?
Six agencies sell an ongoing UX team and publish a named product they stayed with for a year or more, with the criteria used, the cases to inspect and what to agree before month one.
Hiring outside UX help usually goes wrong in one way. The agency treats it as a project, and the startup needs it to behave like a member of the team. A project ends when the files are handed over. A team stays through the next few releases, remembers why the settings screen looks the way it does, and is still there when the roadmap changes.
Six agencies publish both halves of the evidence: a way to hire them month after month, and a named software product they stayed with for about a year or longer. They are Cieden, Eleken, SAY Design, SeaLab, thoughtbot and UX studio, listed alphabetically. Eleken, Cieden and SAY Design are the most direct fit for a team that has engineers and no designer. UX studio puts researchers on the team. thoughtbot suits a startup that is also short of engineers. SeaLab is the one to look at if a design system has to exist before the next ten screens.
Humbleteam publishes this page and sells a design retainer, but it is not in the list. Its public case pages show finished work, and none of them states a year-long or repeated engagement, so it does not meet the second criterion below on public evidence. We would rather print that than loosen the test. The list is an editorial reading of public case studies and service pages, with no paid placements, scores or ranking.
How we chose the agencies
Every agency, Humbleteam included, had to meet four criteria:
- It sells ongoing work on its own site: a retainer, subscription, dedicated team or embedded designer, not only fixed-scope projects.
- It publishes a case on a named software product where it worked for about a year or longer, or came back for several separate engagements.
- The work is product UX and UI for software, not only branding or marketing sites.
- It is an agency, studio or consultancy with more than one person, not a freelancer marketplace and not a single freelancer.
Two names that often come up in this search did not pass on what they publish. Bricx Labs sells an embedded retainer, and Studio Scale sells a monthly design subscription. Neither publishes a named client with a stated year or more of continuous work. That is not a verdict on their skill. Ask each for a client they have worked with for a year.
| Agency | Long-running case to inspect | How you buy it | Consider it when | Based in |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cieden | RevvedUp and Way2B1, about two years each | Dedicated design team, fixed monthly fee for partnerships of six months or more | You want a small named team with a project manager | Remote-first, with addresses in Lviv, Warsaw, Toronto and Wilmington, Delaware |
| Eleken | Aampe, since September 2023 | Monthly subscription per designer, two-month minimum | You have developers and no designer | Kyiv, as a distributed team |
| SAY Design | Unbound Security, 20 months | Embedded plan from $3,000 a month, pause or cancel | You want one team for product, site and pitch deck | Jaipur, India |
| SeaLab | ConnectAI/Goods, January 2024 to March 2025 | Retainers, fractional design leadership, staff augmentation | You need senior designers and a design system | Austin, Texas |
| thoughtbot | Athena, three engagements over five years | Team augmentation, with Shaping Sprints as the starting point | You need engineers as well as designers | Boston mailing address, remote team |
| UX studio | IncQuery Labs, 1.5 years; Targens, 12 months | Dedicated UX teams of designers and researchers, quoted | You want research inside the team | Budapest |
A case study gives you a reason to start a conversation. It does not tell you today’s availability, who would be assigned to you, or what the work would cost.
Cieden: a small named team with a project manager
Cieden is a UX/UI agency that describes itself as remote-first, with teams in Europe and North America. Its dedicated design team page offers either time-and-materials billing or a fixed monthly fee for a dedicated designer. The fixed fee applies to partnerships of six months or more.
Two cases show the model running. In the RevvedUp case, a product designer and a project manager spent about two years with a UK startup building an AI outreach platform, which Cieden says raised £850,000 pre-seed in 2024. The work covered core workflows, a design system and AI prototyping. In the Way2B1 case, a project manager and three product designers worked with the CPO and about six developers of a fintech platform for family offices. Cieden says they became an embedded design department. RevvedUp’s results are qualitative, and Way2B1 reports faster decisions from prototyping rather than a product metric, so ask what each client tracked.
Eleken: a SaaS-only designer on subscription
Eleken describes itself as a product design agency for SaaS, working as a distributed team from Kyiv. Its pricing page lists $4,599 a month for a part-time designer, $6,599 for a full-time designer and $11,999 for two, with a two-month minimum and a free three-day trial. Check the current rates before you plan around them.
The long-running example is Aampe, an AI messaging platform. After trouble with its in-house designer, Aampe took on a full-time Eleken designer in September 2023, who has rebuilt the platform in three-week sprints as business priorities shifted. Eleken titles the case around Aampe’s $18M raise, which is the agency’s framing, so treat it as context rather than proof of cause. Eleken suits a product with engineers, a roadmap and a design vacancy. Ask who steps in if your designer leaves, and who recruits users for testing.
SAY Design: one team for product, site and deck
SAY Design, run by SAY Media Labs in Jaipur, sells an embedded plan from $3,000 a month, with the designers joining your Slack, Jira or Linear and the option to pause or cancel. Its Unbound Security case describes 20 months as founding design partner to a Y Combinator S24 AI security startup, across three product pivots. The team built the design system, the product surfaces, the marketing site and the deck for the seed round. The same case mentions daily stand-ups at 11 PM India time, so settle time zones before you sign.
The scope is the strength and the thing to question. A team that does product, website and pitch materials can keep one visual language. Ask who runs user research, and whether the product work gets the same senior attention as the deck.
SeaLab: senior designers and a design system
SeaLab is a product design consultancy in Austin, Texas. Its about page offers fractional design leadership and staff augmentation, from one embedded senior designer to a fractional team, priced as project quotes, retainers or hourly work. It publishes no rates.
From January 2024 to March 2025 it worked with ConnectAI/Goods, an AI startup in consumer packaged goods. According to SeaLab’s write-up, two designers built a design system from scratch and more than 100 development-ready designs across 14 user flows, with daily asynchronous stand-ups and weekly design system syncs. The case says the flows were designed without user testing. If you need research as well, ask how SeaLab would get access to your users.
thoughtbot: design and engineering under one contract
thoughtbot is a product design and development consultancy that delivers remotely and lists a Boston mailing address. Its services page describes pulling several senior developers and designers in alongside your team for a flexible period, and lists team augmentation. It describes Shaping Sprints as the starting point for new work.
The Athena case covers an education platform. thoughtbot ran a product design sprint and eight weeks of design and development in 2015, returned for a week-long sprint in 2018, and came back in 2020 for a re-platform and redesign. It describes that as more than five years across three discrete engagements. That is a client who kept coming back, not one continuous embed, and each round was scoped separately. Design is one service among several here, so ask for a named design lead.
UX studio: designers and researchers on the same team
UX studio is based in Budapest and offers dedicated UX teams that pair designers with researchers. It offers a free five-day trial that ends in two or three designed screens, and it quotes engagements rather than publishing rates.
In the IncQuery Labs case, a core team of three designers and one researcher worked for a year on a redesign of an engineering data application, then continued with one designer and one researcher on demand, in two-week sprints. The Targens case covers 12 months of work by two designers and a researcher on new compliance software, alongside an external development team. Both clients are software companies rather than consumer apps. Neither case prints a business metric.
How to choose: name the gap first
Start with what is missing on your team today.
- You have engineers, a moving roadmap and no designer: compare Eleken, Cieden and SAY Design on who the named designer would be.
- You do not yet know what users need: UX studio builds research into the team.
- You also lack engineering capacity: thoughtbot can supply both under one contract.
- Your screens are multiplying faster than your patterns: SeaLab and Cieden both describe design system work in their long-running cases.
If you are not sure an ongoing team is the right shape at all, our guide to when startups should bring in an external product design partner covers the signals and the first 30 days. For the choice between an agency, a freelancer and a hire, see agency vs freelancer vs in-house. A retainer is the wrong shape for one contained flow. For that, and for agencies grouped by stage, the comparison of design agencies for funded startups is the better starting point.
What to agree before month one
Long relationships carry their own risk: the designers end up holding the context. Settle these in writing before the first invoice:
- Who the named designers are, and what happens when one leaves.
- Which of your meetings they attend, and how many hours of overlap you need with their time zone.
- Where the files, the design system and the decision log live. They should be in your accounts.
- How you pause, scale down or end the engagement, and what notice that takes.
- What you will measure. Rework between design and development, release cadence and support tickets on designed flows are easier to read than satisfaction.
Then send the same excerpt of your real backlog, three tickets is enough, to two or three of these agencies, and use the free trials where they exist. The questions each one asks back will tell you more than any portfolio.
