Your business has outgrown the spreadsheet, and the off-the-shelf tools almost fit. Almost is expensive.
Custom software development is building a system around your actual process, for the cases where configuring a packaged product would mean changing the business to fit the tool.
When you need this
Situations that bring teams to us
01
The process that makes you money lives in spreadsheets
Quoting, scheduling, or inventory runs on a workbook three people understand, emailed around with version numbers in the filename. It worked at ten orders a day. At a hundred, the errors cost more than software would.
02
You bought a product and now fight it daily
The ERP or CRM handles 70% of your process and the remaining 30% is manual workarounds, exports, and apologies. Sometimes the answer is custom software around the edges of the product, not a replacement; the discovery phase tells us which.
03
Your differentiator cannot be bought
If the way you price, route, or serve customers is why clients pick you, running it on the same software your competitors buy caps the advantage. The differentiating core is the one part of a business we always argue should be custom.
What we deliver
Scoped deliverables with timeframes attached
- Discovery: process mapping, requirements, and a build-versus-buy verdict
- 2-4 weeks
- Clickable prototype validated with the people who will use it
- 2-3 weeks
- Build in two-week sprints with a demo at the end of each
- 3-6 months, scope-dependent
- Data migration from spreadsheets and legacy tools
- 2-4 weeks, parallel to build
- Launch, training sessions, and a 90-day stabilization period
- 2-3 weeks plus 90 days
How we work
The process, drawn honestly
01
Map the process as it is, not as described
We sit with the people doing the work, because the documented process and the real one always differ. The gaps between them are where software projects fail, so we find them before writing requirements.
02
Prototype before committing the budget
A clickable prototype in week three costs a fraction of discovering in month four that the workflow is wrong. Users react to screens; nobody reacts honestly to a requirements document.
03
Ship a working slice early, then widen
The first release handles one real workflow end to end, in production, within the first third of the timeline. Feedback from real use reshapes the rest of the build while reshaping is still cheap.
Our take
We will tell you to buy software more often than we tell you to build it
Custom software is our product, and our first advice is frequently not to buy it. Accounting, payroll, email, generic CRM: packaged products in mature categories are better than what we would build you, because they carry decades of edge cases your project budget never will. Building there is paying custom prices for a worse commodity. The trade-off runs the other way for the process that makes you distinct. Packaged tools force your differentiator into their vendor's average workflow, and the monthly fee is the smallest part of that cost. So the discovery phase ends with a written verdict per process: buy, build, or integrate, with reasoning you can challenge. About a third of our discovery engagements end with us recommending mostly off-the-shelf and a small custom layer on top. We consider those successes, and several came back later with a genuine build.
FAQ
Asked before most engagements
Discovery is fixed-price at $5k-15k. A typical internal business system runs $40k-120k over three to six months; customer-facing products with payments and integrations run higher. Our delivery model prices senior engineering 40-60% below EU and US firms, and every estimate itemizes by feature so you can cut scope before you cut quality.
By pricing change honestly instead of forbidding it. The estimate is itemized per feature, so when a new requirement arrives mid-build, it comes with a cost and a schedule effect, and you decide with the numbers visible. The projects that blow up are the ones where change is informal and the reckoning comes at the end.
You do, in full, from the first invoice onward. Source code, infrastructure configuration, and documentation live in repositories you control. No licensing tail, no source-code escrow theater, and any team you hire after us can pick the system up.
A 90-day stabilization period is included: fixes, small adjustments, and the issues that only real usage surfaces. After that, most clients move to a maintenance agreement from around $1,500 a month, or hand it to their internal team with our documentation. Both paths are first-class; we do not build dependence in.
Often, yes. We audit the existing code first, typically one to two weeks, and give you an honest verdict: continue, salvage parts, or restart. Roughly half of rescue audits find code worth keeping. We will not quote a rescue without the audit, because nobody can price a codebase they have not read.
Start a conversation
Tell us what you are building
Two sentences is enough to start. An engineer replies within one business day.
Industries we apply this in
Hire for this stack