software
The tool your team has wanted for years that no vendor sells, because only you need it. Internal apps, operational dashboards, portals for customers and suppliers, and the spreadsheet that should have been a system a long time ago.
What it looks like from where you're sitting
The process everyone relies on lives in a workbook with 14 tabs and a macro nobody dares open. It works until it doesn't.
You've priced the off-the-shelf options. Each does 70% of what you need and the other 30% is the part that matters.
Customers ring to ask where their order is. The answer is in three systems and a WhatsApp group.
What we do about it
We watch how the job is actually done, then write a short, readable specification. You sign off the words before anyone writes code.
Working software every week or two, on a link you can use. Change your mind early while it's cheap.
Proven languages, relational databases, plain web interfaces. Fast to build, cheap to run, and another engineer can pick it up in a day.
Talks to the systems you already have rather than creating another island. See Systems that talk to each other.
Source code, documentation and deployment all handed over. Hosted in your accounts if you want it. No lock-in by design.
Monitoring, updates, small changes and a person who answers. Most of our tools are still in daily use years after launch.
For the technical reader
Server-rendered web apps or lean APIs with a simple front end, depending on who's using it and where. Go for services that need to be fast and small; PHP where it fits the estate. Postgres by default. Authentication, audit trails and role-based access from the start, not bolted on.
Everything under version control, built and deployed through a pipeline, with staging and production separated. Logging and error reporting wired in on day one. We write the runbook as we go so handover is a formality.
Dozens of small-business sites across several servers, and nothing off the shelf that watched them the way we wanted without a login to each one or a bill per site. We built a small agent that reports in on a heartbeat and a central Go service that collects, backs up, updates and optimises. One screen for the whole estate, and a site that goes quiet is itself the alert. Used daily on our own hosting.
Tell us what it does and who uses it. We'll tell you what replacing it properly looks like and roughly what it costs.