Evil Martians

Evil Martians is a product development consultancy that specialises in developer tools. It works with early-stage companies building devtools, AI agents and AI-native products, infrastructure and cybersecurity software, and describes its role as helping them go from proof of concept to a first product, find product-market fit and then scale. Its site gives a founding date in 2006.

The company lists offices in San Francisco, New York, Porto and Osaka, but its team works remotely and serves clients across the major time zones. Many developers know it before they ever hire it, through open-source projects such as PostCSS, Nano ID, imgproxy, AnyCable and Lefthook, and through its engineering blog, Martian Chronicles.

Key features

• Product development. Prototyping, building a minimum viable product for early users and growing it into enterprise features, with engineers and designers embedded in the client's repository, chat and stand-ups.
• Ruby on Rails consulting. New Rails projects and work on existing ones, plus a dedicated Rails CI speed-up service that profiles slow test suites and adds tooling to keep them fast.
• AI engineering. Forward deployed engineering with a client's own customers, LLM benchmarking built from real tasks in a client's repository, and a UI coding harness of design-system guardrails for engineers and AI agents.
• Infrastructure and performance. Go concurrency and performance audits, platform engineering on Kubernetes and multiple clouds, database optimisation and real-time front ends for streaming, voice and collaborative editing.
• Design for technical products. Dashboards, CLIs, SDKs, documentation and security-team interfaces designed for developer and cybersecurity audiences.
• Start-up advisory and go-to-market. Working sessions on positioning, pricing and fundraising, and launch materials written for developers.
• Open source. More than 100 maintained projects, which the company says have over 25 billion downloads in total.

Who it is for

Evil Martians fits seed to growth-stage start-ups whose customers are developers or technical teams: companies building SDKs, CLIs, infrastructure, AI tooling or security products that need senior engineers and designers who understand that audience. It also suits product teams on Ruby on Rails or Go that need help with performance, CI or scaling. A business that wants a simple marketing site or a standard mobile app is outside its stated focus.

Pricing at a glance

Evil Martians is unusual among agencies in publishing a rate: its site states $7,000 per week for each engineer or designer on the engagement. The total depends on team size and duration, and each engagement is scoped by product stage, complexity and goals before a tailored estimate is given. Prices as checked on 10 October 2026; confirm on the vendor's pricing page.

Things to consider

• Specialist focus. The portfolio centres on developer tools, AI and infrastructure; general business software is not where it competes.
• Senior, embedded model. The team works inside your tools and rituals, so plan for your own product owner and decision-making to keep pace.
• Weekly billing adds up. Agree team size, duration and review points in writing so the budget stays predictable.
• Remote across time zones. Confirm which office or region will staff your work and the hours of overlap.

Getting started

1. Read the services page and pick the area closest to your problem.
2. Look through the company's open-source projects on GitHub to judge its engineering style.
3. Prepare your product stage, stack, goals and timeline.
4. Get in touch through the contact page and ask for a scoped estimate.