A proposal to design, build and lead the engineering of a production-grade ride-hailing platform — delivered by a senior engineer with a decade of enterprise experience, on a profit-aligned commercial model.
18 July 2026
To: The Founding Directors & Partners
Re: Proposal to lead the design and development of the ride-share platform
Dear Partners,
Thank you for the opportunity to put forward this proposal. I am excited by the vision for a home-grown, South-African ride-share platform, and I am writing to offer not only my services as a software engineer, but my commitment as a technical partner who shares in the risk — and the reward — of building something that lasts.
Over the past decade in software engineering, I have spent more than seven years delivering production-grade systems for some of South Africa's largest institutions — ABSA / Barclays, Standard Bank, Discovery and Cell C. These were not prototypes; they were regulated, high-availability platforms handling real customers, real money and real accountability. This is precisely the discipline a ride-share business demands: secure payments, live location, driver and rider trust, and infrastructure that stays up when it matters.
Beyond writing code, I have led and mentored engineering teams — most recently as Project Lead for a team of eight developers — owning architecture, client relationships, risk assessment and delivery. I know how to take a concept from a whiteboard to a resilient, scalable product, and how to grow the people who build it. That combination of hands-on senior engineering and proven technical leadership is what I bring to this venture.
To align my success with yours, I propose that my professional fee remains suspended and payable only once the company turns a profit. In the interim, my development contribution is offered as deferred value — negotiable against an equity stake. All hosting, infrastructure and associated operating costs are to be carried by the partners / directors, as detailed in the budget that follows.
In short: I invest my expertise and my time up-front; you invest in the running costs and a fair share of ownership. We both win when the business wins. The pages that follow set out my experience and certifications, the commercial terms, and a transparent monthly operating budget so that every party can make an informed decision.
I would welcome the chance to discuss this further and to begin shaping the technical roadmap.
Enterprise systems built and shipped for South Africa's leading banks, insurers and telcos — the same rigour a ride-share platform requires.
Architecture & design of new features, development and testing on a regulated trade-management platform. Mentoring, coaching and expectation management across the team.
Java 11–21Spring BootAxonSpring BatchAWSAngular 11+PostgreSQLJenkinsSonarQubeProject Lead for eight developers. Owned architecture & design, delivery, and client relationships. Project planning, risk assessment, mentoring and coaching.
Team LeadershipJava 11Spring BootSpring Admin/BatchAWSAngular 11+PostgreSQLBambooManaged a project of 3 developers with mentorship and guidance. Architecture, design and delivery; managing client relationships and expectations.
MentorshipJava 8–11Node.jsReduxPostgreSQLLiquibaseMentored developers in the health space; managed a team of 3. Architecture, design and delivery of new features in a high-compliance domain.
MentorshipJava 11Spring CloudSpring BatchOracle DBAngularJSDevelopment, testing, design and grooming of new feature sets on a high-traffic consumer telco platform.
ReactJava 7MongoDBMavenUniversity of Johannesburg. Residence Academic Advisor & Mentor. Abstract Algebra, Calculus, Informatics & Software Engineering.
Java SE 8 Programmer I (OCP) — Oracle. Validated professional-grade Java proficiency.
Amazon Web Services — foundational cloud certification underpinning the proposed AWS-based architecture.
| Year | Achievement | Region |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | National Finalist — Microsoft Imagine Cup | RSA |
| 2016 | Runner-up — Discovery GradHack | RSA |
| 2016 | Top 10 — Informatics (Software Engineering) 3A, University of Johannesburg | RSA |
| 2015 | Top 10 — Computer Science 2B, University of Johannesburg | RSA |
| 2014 | Top 10 — Computer Science 1B, University of Johannesburg | RSA |
Java (Spring Boot / Cloud / Batch) Angular 11+ React / React-Native PostgreSQL MongoDB AWS CI/CD (Jenkins / Bamboo) SonarQube Git — a battle-tested, enterprise stack ideal for a secure, scalable ride-share platform.
A risk-aligned model: I defer my fee and invest my expertise; the partners fund the running costs and share ownership.
My professional development fee is suspended and becomes payable only once the company turns a profit. Until then it accrues as deferred value and is negotiable against an equity stake. The more equity offered, the greater the fee reduction or waiver.
All hosting, infrastructure, third-party services and associated operating costs are carried by the partners / directors from day one. These are true cash costs to keep the platform live and are itemised in the budget that follows.
| Item | Who Pays | When | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Engineering & development | Deferred (founder) | On profitability | Negotiable against equity; accrues as founder contribution |
| Hosting & infrastructure | Partners / Directors | Monthly, from launch | AWS, domains, comms, security — see budget |
| Third-party & security audits | Partners / Directors | As incurred | External penetration test, tooling licences |
| Payment gateway fees | Partners / Directors | Per transaction | Pass-through % on each ride (revenue-linked) |
| Equity offered to founder | Deferred fee treatment | Cash fee on profit |
|---|---|---|
| Higher equity share | Largely / fully waived | Minimal |
| Moderate equity share | Partly waived | Reduced |
| Low / no equity share | Payable in full on profit | Market rate |
Exact percentages, vesting and the profit definition (e.g. net operating profit after a defined runway) to be agreed in a shareholders' / founders' agreement.
Definition of "profit": to be defined jointly — recommended as sustained net operating profit after operating costs, over a rolling 3-month period, to avoid triggering fees on a single positive month.
A realistic development & staging environment on AWS — budgeted at ≈ R8,000 / month while the MVP is built, integrated and tested. Every AWS service is itemised below. This phase is kept entirely separate from the live production budget and is fixed & independent of the user-scale selector.
| Cost Category | AWS Service / Sizing | Monthly (ZAR) | Paid By |
|---|---|---|---|
| Development & engineering | Senior/Lead effort — notional value R150,000 | R0 | Deferred |
| Itemised AWS services (development + staging) | |||
| Compute — containers | ECS Fargate — dev + staging application services | R1,500 | Partners |
| Database | RDS PostgreSQL db.t4g.small, Single-AZ + automated backups | R1,100 | Partners |
| In-memory cache | ElastiCache Redis — cache.t4g.micro (sessions / geo) | R400 | Partners |
| Load balancer | Application Load Balancer (ALB) for dev/staging API | R450 | Partners |
| Networking | NAT gateway + inter-AZ / egress data transfer | R700 | Partners |
| Digital asset storage | S3 — dev driver/rider images & KYC test data | R340 | Partners |
| Static hosting & CDN | CloudFront + S3 — proposal / landing site (this site) | R150 | Partners |
| Container registry | Amazon ECR — image storage | R120 | Partners |
| CI/CD pipeline | CodePipeline + CodeBuild — build, test & deploy | R400 | Partners |
| Monitoring & logging | CloudWatch — logs, metrics, dashboards & alarms | R550 | Partners |
| Secrets & keys | Secrets Manager + KMS — credentials & encryption | R200 | Partners |
| Email & SMS | SES + low-volume test SMS (integration testing) | R350 | Partners |
| Security tooling (dev) | GuardDuty + Inspector — threat & vulnerability scanning | R550 | Partners |
| Backups & snapshots | AWS Backup — dev retention policy | R300 | Partners |
| DNS | Route 53 — hosted zone + query volume | R60 | Partners |
| Domain (already registered) | lusani-tshigabe.com — .com amortised | R100 | Partners |
| Sub-total — AWS services | R7,270 | Partners | |
| Contingency @ 10% (price / usage variance) | R727 | Partners | |
| DEVELOPMENT-PHASE MONTHLY TOTAL (AWS) | R7,997 ≈ R8,000 | Partners | |
This ≈ R8,000 development spend is ring-fenced from the production budget on the next page. Full production controls (Multi-AZ, WAF, DDoS/DNS protection, auto-scaling and cross-region DR) switch on only at launch, when real users and revenue arrive.
Good-faith estimates in ZAR (AWS af-south-1); actual spend varies with list pricing, exchange rates and usage. Charged only while building; the founder's engineering fee remains deferred throughout.
Live estimate for 5,000 active users (ZAR, AWS af-south-1). Fixed baseline is always-on; variable costs scale with the selected user count. Recommended compute band: Tier 2 — Growth.
| Cost Category | Basis / Sizing | Monthly (ZAR) | Paid By |
|---|---|---|---|
| A · Fixed baseline (always-on) | |||
| Development & engineering | Deferred until profitability | R0 | Deferred |
| Domains (.com + email) | Registered domain, amortised | R100 | Partners |
| Compute baseline (ECS Fargate) | Minimum 2 always-on tasks | R1,800 | Partners |
| Database (RDS, Multi-AZ) | db.t4g.medium + daily backups | R3,800 | Partners |
| Load balancer (ALB) | 1 × ALB + LCUs | R450 | Partners |
| Networking (NAT + egress) | 1 × NAT gateway | R650 | Partners |
| Security tooling | WAF, DNS protection, GuardDuty, Inspector, KMS | R2,000 | Partners |
| Monitoring & logging | CloudWatch, logs, alerting | R700 | Partners |
| Disaster recovery | Cross-region snapshots | R500 | Partners |
| CI/CD pipeline | Build, registry, deployment | R300 | Partners |
| Fixed baseline sub-total | R10,300 | Partners | |
| B · Variable — scales with 5,000 users | |||
| Compute scaling | R280 / 1,000 users | R1,400 | Partners |
| Database I/O & storage growth | R190 / 1,000 users | R950 | Partners |
| Asset storage & CDN | R120 / 1,000 users (~2 GB each) | R600 | Partners |
| Bandwidth / data transfer | R160 / 1,000 users | R800 | Partners |
| Monitoring & security scaling | R100 / 1,000 users | R500 | Partners |
| Email (SES) | ~6,000 emails / 1,000 users @ R2/1,000 | R60 | Partners |
| SMS / OTP (local SA) | ~4,000 SMS / 1,000 users @ R300/1,000 | R6,000 | Partners |
| Variable sub-total | R10,310 | Partners | |
| Operating sub-total (fixed + variable) | R20,610 | Partners | |
| Contingency @ 10% | R2,061 | Partners | |
| PRODUCTION MONTHLY TOTAL (excl. periodic audit) | R22,671 | Partners | |
External security analysis: R70,000 per engagement (independent firm), recommended annually. Amortised ≈ R5,833 / month.
All-in monthly incl. amortised audit ≈ R28,504.
Payment-gateway fees (~2.5%–3.5% per transaction) are pass-through and revenue-linked. SMS is the largest scaling cost — reducible via push notifications / WhatsApp as adoption grows.
Estimates in ZAR (AWS af-south-1); will vary with list pricing, exchange rates, actual traffic and vendor choice. Reserved-instance / savings plans can cut compute & database costs 30–50% at scale. Per-1,000-user rates are shown on the next page.
How costs move as the platform grows — per 1,000 users, per 1,000 messages, and by transaction throughput.
| Component | Assumption per 1,000 users | ZAR / mo |
|---|---|---|
| Compute share | API & matching load | R280 |
| Database & backups share | Reads/writes, trip history | R190 |
| Asset storage & CDN | ~2 GB images / KYC per 1,000 | R120 |
| Bandwidth / data transfer | App & map tile traffic | R160 |
| Monitoring & security share | Logging, WAF, threat detection | R100 |
| Marginal infra cost per 1,000 users (excl. SMS/OTP) | ≈ R850 | |
Excludes SMS/OTP and email, which are billed separately below, and excludes payment-gateway fees (revenue-linked).
| Channel | Unit basis | Per 1,000 | Per message |
|---|---|---|---|
| Email (transactional, SES) | Receipts, notices, verification | R2 | R0.002 |
| SMS / OTP (local SA) | Verification, trip & driver alerts | R300 | R0.30 |
SMS is the dominant communications cost; volumes can be reduced with push notifications and WhatsApp Business API as adoption grows.
| Tier | Throughput | Task sizing | ZAR / mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 — Launch | up to ~60 tx/min | 2 × 0.5 vCPU / 1 GB | R1,800 |
| Tier 2 — Growth | up to ~300 tx/min | 2–4 × 1 vCPU / 2 GB (auto-scale) | R4,500 |
| Tier 3 — Scale | up to ~1,000 tx/min | 4–8 × 2 vCPU / 4 GB (auto-scale) | R12,000 |
| Tier 4 — High scale | 3,000+ tx/min | Auto-scaling fleet + read replicas | R30,000+ |
At your selected scale the recommended band is Tier 2 — Growth. Moving to reserved capacity / savings plans at Tier 3–4 typically reduces effective compute cost by 30–50%.
| Control | Purpose | ZAR / mo |
|---|---|---|
| Web Application Firewall (WAF) | Block injection, bots, OWASP Top 10 | R350 |
| DNS protection & DNSSEC (Route 53 / Cloudflare) | DDoS-resilient, tamper-proof DNS | R400 |
| Threat detection (GuardDuty + Security Hub) | Continuous account monitoring | R900 |
| Vulnerability scanning (Inspector) | Image & workload CVE scanning | R150 |
| Secrets & key management (KMS / Secrets Mgr) | Encrypt data & credentials | R200 |
| Security tooling sub-total (in monthly budget) | R2,000 | |
Independent external penetration test / security analysis: R70,000 per engagement (recommended annually) — carried by partners, shown on the budget page.
| Item | Nature | Indicative |
|---|---|---|
| Payment gateway fees | Per-transaction % | 2.5%–3.5% / txn |
| Maps & geolocation API | Usage-based | R0.02–R0.10 / request |
| Push notifications | Low-cost / free tier | ~R0–R300 / mo |
| App store fees (Apple / Google) | Annual developer accounts | ~R2,500 / yr |
| Business insurance & legal | Founder/partner discretion | TBD |
| Marketing & driver acquisition | Growth budget | TBD |
I am ready to commit a decade of hard-won engineering and leadership experience to this venture — deferring my fee so that we succeed together. With the partners funding a lean, transparent operating budget and a fair equity share on the table, we have a genuinely aligned foundation to build a trusted South-African ride-share platform.
This document is a proposal for discussion only and does not constitute a binding offer or agreement. All figures are good-faith estimates in ZAR and are subject to change based on vendor pricing, exchange rates, actual usage and final scope. Confidential — prepared for the intended recipients only.