Service

Custom software

Most businesses should not commission custom software. Off-the-shelf is cheaper, supported by someone else, and available on Tuesday. We will say so when it applies, which is more often than you might expect from someone selling the alternative.

The cases where building is genuinely right are narrower and easier to recognise than the sales pitch suggests.

When building is the right call

The process is the advantage. The way you do this thing is why customers choose you, and bending it to fit a product would cost you the edge.
The seat count no longer works. Per-user pricing on a tool you barely use has quietly overtaken what building would have cost.
Nothing joins up. Four products each solve a fifth of the problem and someone spends their week in the gaps between them.
It is a real product. You are selling the software itself, not using it.

What we build

Web applications, internal tools and admin panels, mobile applications, and the APIs and background services behind them. Boring, well-understood technology chosen because someone other than us has to maintain it eventually.

We do not pick a framework because it is interesting. The bar is whether a competent developer you hire in three years will recognise it.

How it runs

Fixed scopeAgreed in writing before anything starts. The price does not move unless you change what you asked for.

Working earlyYou see software running long before the end. Larger builds are split into stages that each deliver something usable.

Your infrastructureIt deploys to your accounts from the start, not ours. No migration at the end, no hostage situation.

HandoverSource, docs and a walkthrough session. Written so someone else could pick it up, because one day someone will.

What you own

All of it. Source code, documentation, and the accounts it runs on. Thirty days of fixes are included after launch, and after that you can take it in-house, keep us on the Managed plan, or hand it to anyone else. That is the point of writing the documentation properly.

What we will not do

Build something the numbers do not justify. If a spreadsheet and a scheduled report would get you eighty per cent of the value for two per cent of the cost, that is the recommendation you will get.

Not sure it needs building? Describe what you are trying to do and what you have tried. If something off-the-shelf already does it, we will point you at it — that answer costs you nothing and saves you a great deal.

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