In 2017, every credible software shop in the Philippines was in Metro Manila. BGC, Makati, Ortigas, Quezon City. If you wanted to build a serious digital product, the unspoken assumption was that you went to Metro Manila and paid for an Ayala-Avenue office to build it.
We started a software studio in Silang, Cavite instead. This is why.
The Manila premium was real, and not justified
By 2017, a few patterns were obvious to anyone who had worked inside Metro Manila agencies. Rent in BGC was a major line item. Premium salaries for engineers who happened to live within commute distance of BGC were another. Both costs got passed to clients as part of the hourly rate. The work was not consistently better. Often it was identical to what could be produced for 40 percent less by a focused team based outside NCR.
The argument for being in Manila was access: access to clients, access to talent, access to investors. By 2017 that argument was already weakening. Clients took meetings on Zoom. Senior engineers were leaving NCR for Cavite, Laguna, and Batangas because traffic and rent had become unbearable. Investors evaluated outputs on GitHub, not the agency's lobby. The geography no longer determined the quality of work; only the team did.
Silang gave us something Manila could not
Silang sits about an hour south of Makati, on the right side of Tagaytay Ridge. It is quieter than Cavite City or Dasmariñas. The land is cheaper. The air is cooler. We could afford a real workspace instead of a coworking corner. We could afford to hire well, slowly, without the pressure to recoup BGC overhead on every invoice.
More importantly, Silang put us close to a kind of client we wanted to work with. Family businesses in Tagaytay, Imus, and Dasmariñas. Healthcare practitioners in Bacoor. Real estate brokers across the province. Logistics operators near the Cavite Economic Zone. Businesses that were ready to digitize, that had real revenue, and that had been quoted ridiculous prices by Makati shops. We thought we could build for them at a fairer rate and still do excellent work.
What we believed from day one
A few principles got written down in 2017 and have not changed.
Strategy comes before code. Half the projects pitched to us did not need to be built. We would say so before billing for it. The strategy work is not preamble, it is the deliverable.
One team, no handoffs. Strategy, design, and engineering had to live under one roof. Every brief that got passed across agencies lost something in translation. We would absorb that translation cost ourselves, not pass it to clients.
Fixed quotes, not hourly billing. Time-and-materials billing rewards slow developers. Fixed quotes force the studio to scope carefully, then take the hit if it underestimates. That alignment, painful as it is, makes both sides better.
Long-term partnership, not project delivery. A project that launches and dies six months later was a project we should not have taken. Maintenance, growth, and ongoing iteration had to be part of the engagement, not an afterthought.
What we did not believe in 2017
We did not believe Cavite was a stepping stone to "graduating" to Manila. The plan was always to build the studio here, hire here, and ship from here. Eight years later that has not changed.
We did not believe in flashy. We had no marketing budget, no LinkedIn-influencer founder posts, no "thought leadership" content factory. The plan was to ship good work and let the work talk. That worked, eventually. It was slower than a Manila-style growth play would have been. It also created a client base that did not churn.
We did not believe in chasing every new platform. WordPress was the default in 2017, and we built on it when it fit. But we also knew we would move clients off WordPress when the requirements outgrew it, and we were ready to recommend that even when it cost us a maintenance contract.
Why this matters in 2026
A lot of what we wrote in our 2017 founding notes reads like common sense now. Most studios outside Manila operate this way. Strategy-led, fixed-quote engagements are no longer rare. Long-term product partnerships are the norm for serious software work. The premium for being in BGC is harder to defend than it has ever been.
For us, though, the 2017 decisions are not abstract values. They are the structure of how the studio actually operates today: who we hire, what work we accept, how we price, and where we put roots. Silang in 2017 was a bet. Eight years and 70-plus shipped products later, it has paid off in ways we did not anticipate.
If you are evaluating a Cavite-based studio versus a Manila one for your next build, the question is not where they are. It is whether they have the process, the team, and the judgment to ship the thing you actually need. Ask for those answers. The address is the least interesting part of the decision.