When bespoke is the right answer
Most businesses should buy software, not build it. Accounting, payroll, email, a CRM for a sales team that sells the ordinary way — the market has solved those, and paying someone to solve them again is money spent on nothing.
Bespoke earns its place in a narrower set of cases, and they are easy to recognise:
- The spreadsheet is still open next to the software. The product you pay for covers eighty per cent of the job, and the other twenty is done by hand, in Excel, by the one person who understands it.
- Your process is the thing you are good at. An estimating method, a way of scheduling work, a service standard. Generic software flattens it into everybody else's.
- Several systems each hold part of the truth. Nobody can answer a simple question — where is this job, has this been paid — without opening three of them.
- You have outgrown what you have. It worked when you were half the size, and now the workarounds are the process.
If none of those is true, we will tell you to buy something, and usually which thing.
What we build
Line-of-business applications: the system where the state of the business is true. In practice that tends to mean some combination of:
- Job, order or case tracking — every piece of work, where it is, and who has it
- Roles and permissions — staff, managers, clients and subcontractors each seeing what they should and nothing else
- Customer-facing portals where clients can serve themselves instead of ringing you
- Integrations with what you already pay for: accounting, payments, email
- Operational reporting that answers the question on the day it is asked, not after a week of spreadsheet work
For an accountancy practice we replaced an end-of-life system with a platform of six applications — staff dashboard, client portal, document extraction — on one shared foundation. For a construction and M&E group we built eight applications on a single platform, from estimating to project management. The case studies below have the detail.
How it is built
Everything is TypeScript end to end: Next.js and React on the front, NestJS and PostgreSQL behind it. That is a deliberate choice of boring, widely known technology. Any competent engineer can pick it up after us, which matters more over five years than anything clever would.
It is deployed by pipeline rather than by hand, environments are reproducible, and the parts where being wrong is expensive — money, permissions, anything a customer sees — are covered by tests.
How it is priced
Fixed price, off a scope agreed in writing before anything is built. You know what you are paying before the first line of code, and the written scope is what we both refer back to when something changes mid-build.
Engagements start from £4,000. Most first builds of a real business system land between £8,000 and £15,000; larger platforms are phased so each phase is useful on its own. The cost guide sets out what drives the number.
What you own
Unless we agree otherwise up front, the code, the hosting, the domains and every third-party account are set up in your name as the work goes, not handed over at the end as a favour. If you ever want someone else to take it on, they can, without asking us. Who owns the code explains why that should be true of any supplier you hire.
What it is not
The engineering is done by one senior engineer: the person who scopes the work writes it and deploys it. That is what makes it fast and what keeps it coherent. It also means we are the wrong fit for a project that needs a team of five on day one, or a round-the-clock on-call rota — and you will hear that on the first call, not a fortnight before a deadline.