Web apps · from $2,900
The software your business runs on, built around it.
Most businesses end up bending their process to fit software someone else designed. When the process is the thing that makes you money, that is backwards — so build the tool around the process instead.
Built for the way you already work.
The best internal tool is one nobody has to be trained on, because it matches the order things already happen in.
- A proper scoping pass first. Before a price exists, we work out what it actually has to do. Most of the cost in software comes from building the wrong thing well.
- Your process, not a generic one. If your quotes go out before the site visit, the software does that. It should not be arguing with you about the order of your own work.
- Roles and permissions. Who can see what, who can change what, and an audit trail for the things that matter when something is disputed later.
- It works on a phone. If half the use happens standing in a customer's kitchen, a desktop-only tool is a tool nobody uses.
- Reporting that answers real questions. Not a wall of charts. The three or four numbers you actually check, on the screen you land on.
- It talks to what you already have. Accounting, email, WhatsApp, payment providers — connected properly so nothing needs typing in twice.
- Hosted on your own server. Your account, your data, your control. No per-seat fee that grows every time you hire someone.
- Source code, handed over. Documented well enough that another developer could pick it up. That is the test of whether you really own it.
Off-the-shelf is cheaper until the month it isn't.
Subscription software is the right answer far more often than developers admit. It stops being the right answer at a fairly predictable point.
- Per-seat pricing means your software bill grows every time you hire, forever
- The workaround spreadsheet that lives alongside the tool is the tool telling you it does not fit
- Exporting your data out of someone else's platform is deliberately harder than putting it in
- A tool built once and owned outright has no renewal that can be repriced on you
Scoped properly before anything is quoted.
Software is the one thing here I will not price from a one-line description, because that is how projects go wrong.
You describe the problem
Not the software you think you want — the thing that is currently painful.
We scope it together
Screens, rules and edge cases written down in plain English until we both recognise your business in it.
A fixed price, in writing
One number for a defined build. If scope changes later, that is a separate conversation with its own number.
You use it as it is made
Working software in stages on a live link, so problems surface while they are still cheap to fix.
The ones that come up every time.
Honestly, it rarely matters to you and I will pick based on what the thing has to do. PHP suits most business applications and hosts anywhere cheaply. Node earns its place when a lot happens in real time. Either way it runs on your own hosting and the code is yours.
From around $2,900 for something focused — a booking system, a client portal, an internal tracker. Larger builds are quoted after scoping, because a number given before anyone has thought about the edge cases is a number that gets revised upward later.
Small changes are usually quick and I will tell you when something is a five-minute job rather than invoicing it as a project. Bigger additions get their own scope and their own fixed price. Nothing is on a retainer you cannot leave.
Usually, yes. Accounting tools, CRMs, payment providers and messaging platforms almost all publish an API. If one does not, I will say so early rather than discover it halfway through the build.
The code is documented and handed over, running on hosting in your name, and built with ordinary well-known tools rather than anything exotic. Any competent developer can pick it up. A tool you cannot hand to someone else is not really yours.
Describe the process. I'll tell you honestly if software helps.
Some of these conversations end with me saying a spreadsheet is fine. That answer is free too.