You Searched "Software Development Agency." You Probably Meant Something Else.

Type "software development agency" into Google and you get two kinds of results. One is a large firm built for a procurement team running a six-month RFP with a legal department attached. The other is a web or marketing agency that lists software as one more line on a long services page. Neither is going to tell you what it costs to fix the dispatch board that's actually costing you money.

Here's the distinction that matters. A web development agency builds the site people see before they buy from you. A software development agency builds the tool your team uses after they've already bought, the thing that runs the business once the sale is made. If you've outgrown a spreadsheet, you want the second one.

What We Build

Custom web applications means portals, dashboards, and workflow tools. Role-based access, audit trails, approvals that route to the right person. Built in React, Node, and Postgres. Typically 10–20 weeks, from $45k.

Mobile apps means iOS and Android for field crews and technicians who don't have signal half the day. Offline-first data, photo, signature, and barcode capture. Built in Swift, Kotlin, and React Native. Typically 12–22 weeks, from $60k.

CRMs and internal tools means quoting, dispatch, job scheduling, and invoicing that lands in your accounting package. Typically 8–18 weeks, from $38k.

AI and automation means pulling structured data out of documents and email, or search over your own files instead of the open internet. Accuracy testing and a human review step, built in. Typically 6–14 weeks, from $32k.

Integrations means two systems that don't talk to each other, talking. Two-way sync with retry and reconciliation. Legacy systems that never had an API to begin with. Alerts that name the specific record that failed, not just "sync error." Typically 4–10 weeks, from $22k.

Cloud and DevOps means infrastructure as code in your own cloud account and a named person on call. From $4.5k a month, ongoing. Software doesn't stop needing attention the week it ships.

Who This Is For

Companies that have outgrown the spreadsheet everyone secretly runs the business on. Or an off-the-shelf tool that almost fits, until someone starts re-typing numbers from one screen into another every morning. We see this most in logistics and freight, healthcare, field services, manufacturing, professional services, retail and e-commerce, fintech and insurance, and construction. Complicated enough that a template stops working. Not so large that there's an in-house engineering team of fifty.

If that's not you, the rest of this probably isn't either.

What We Turn Down

We turn down projects a specialist would do better. If you need deep expertise in one narrow platform, a specific e-commerce engine, a specific EHR, a shop that focuses only on that will likely do it better than we would, and we'll say so on the call. We turn down projects an off-the-shelf product already solves for a tenth of the price. If your problem is "we need a help desk tool" and a $30-a-month subscription does that job, we're not going to build you one just to bill you for it. And we don't build marketing or brochure sites. That's a different craft, done well by people who focus on it.

You'll hear all of this in the first call, not the third, after a discovery week has already been paid for.

How an Engagement Starts

We don't quote a price on the first call. Scope changes the number too much for that to mean anything on its own. We start with a discovery week: flat $4,800, credited back in full if you continue into a project. It ends in a written scope, an architecture sketch, and a fixed estimate. Not a guess. Not a range. A number you can take to whoever signs the cheque, because it came from an actual look at your data, your systems, and the messy part nobody mentions in the first email.

The Fixed-Scope Model, in Plain Terms

Once scope is locked, a fixed-scope project starts from $28k per phase, billed on milestones. Typically 30% at kickoff, the rest as each phase is accepted. Every phase includes 30 days of post-launch fixes, because the first month after launch is when real usage finds the edge cases a test plan didn't. Billing terms are Net 14.

If you're looking to hire a software development agency for something like a CRM rebuild or a quoting tool, this is the mechanism: a price tied to what gets delivered, not hours on a timesheet.

Who Owns the Code and the Infrastructure

You own the code outright, from day one. Repos sit in your organisation, not ours. Infrastructure runs in your own cloud account, built with infrastructure as code, so it's documented rather than living in one engineer's head. This is the direct answer to the vendor lock-in worry. "You own it" means nothing if the repo is sitting in someone else's account when the relationship ends.

One Named Lead, Start to Finish

The person who scopes your project on the discovery call is the same person who stays through launch. No handoff to a junior team once the contract is signed. Partly that's a promise. Mostly it's just how a small studio works: there's no bench of anonymous staff to hand you off to.

NDA by Default, No Certifications We Don't Have

We work under NDA by default and complete vendor security questionnaires as part of onboarding. What we won't do is claim HIPAA, SOC 2, or PCI-DSS certification. Those aren't things we hold, and we're not going to imply otherwise just because those words show up in searches from healthcare and fintech buyers. If a certification is a hard requirement for your project, ask directly, early.

The Litmus Test

If what you need is a homepage, or a site that explains your business to strangers, you need a web designer, not this. If an off-the-shelf tool does the job with a few settings changed, buy that. It's a tenth of the price and none of the maintenance burden.

But if you're re-entering the same numbers into two systems every week, chasing approvals over email because nothing routes automatically, or the report your finance team needs doesn't exist anywhere: that's the trigger. That's custom software for the internal tools nobody else is going to build for you, at a price you can name before the first call instead of after the third.