How a dev squad works inside an on-demand marketplace

A dev squad working inside an on-demand marketplace doesn't rebuild itself from scratch for every client or sign a long-term contract with a single company: it keeps its already-formed team structure, takes on projects milestone by milestone through the platform, and can run several projects in parallel depending on its real availability. The platform builds the match, structures payment per milestone, and lets the squad's reputation carry over from one project to the next — the team doesn't have to restart the trust conversation from zero with every new client.

It's a different model from freelancing solo and from being an agency that negotiates account by account: the squad already worked together before showing up in any match, and the relationship with each company lasts as long as the project — not permanent headcount, not a single account to depend on.

Why does an already-formed squad join a marketplace instead of going out to find clients directly?

The freelance market has stopped being mostly individual. According to Upwork's Future Workforce Index 2025 — a survey of roughly 3,000 skilled US-based workers conducted between December 2024 and February 2025 — 43% of skilled freelancers already operate under the “Agency Freelancer” model: teaming up with others to offer end-to-end services to companies, ahead of the 33% working as a “Managed Services Freelancer” and the 31% who identify as an “AI-Enabled Freelancer.” The trend isn't toward more solo freelancers, it's toward more teams presenting themselves as a single unit.

There's a business reason behind it, not just a preference. 2025 M&A benchmarks (L40) use a known threshold to measure the risk of a company depending on too few clients: below 10% of revenue from a single client is considered healthy, between 10% and 20% is already a risk zone, and above 20% many buyers walk away outright. A squad working for one or two fixed clients carries the same fragility — it only takes one of them pausing a project to shake the whole business. Joining an on-demand marketplace with several projects running at once is, in practice, diversifying that dependency without having to sell account by account.

What changes about how a squad gets paid?

The most concrete risk of working client by client isn't just landing the project — it's getting paid on time. According to Remote's 2025 Contractor Management Report, 85% of freelancers had at least one invoice paid late, and just over 21% get paid late — or not at all — more than half the time. A Bonsai analysis of three years of invoicing data from more than 100,000 freelancers found that 29% of all invoices are paid at least one day late. That's exactly the problem a well-designed escrow solves: funds lock before the squad starts working, and release per milestone delivered and validated — not whenever it's convenient for the company to pay.

How does reputation carry over from one project to the next?

When every client is an isolated relationship, reputation doesn't travel: the squad has to rebuild trust from zero every time, with testimonials or a portfolio anyone can curate by hand. On an on-demand marketplace, reputation accumulates project after project based on verifiable signals — on-time delivery, milestones completed, client diversity, disputes — not self-reported by the squad or by a single client it happened to leave a good (or bad) impression on.

What doesn't change — and what does a squad give up?

Joining a marketplace doesn't replace the work of being a good team: the squad is still responsible for the quality of what it delivers, and the marketplace doesn't hand-pick whichever project is most convenient for a given squad — that's decided by real fit between what the squad is good at and what the project needs, not who bid first or cheapest. What does change is who does the work of finding that fit: instead of the squad spending time selling its own profile client by client, Kaizen understands the project in depth before proposing a match, and the squad focuses on what it already knows how to do.

Squad pre-registration at Zenit is open: the first teams to join start building their ZenitRank history from day one, ahead of company access opening to the public.