08 Custom & bespoke
Custom software
What you need is not on this list, but it can almost certainly be assembled from parts that already exist. We find them, put them together and hand the result to you under a licence you keep.
- Available as
- SaaS or Custom
- Hosting
- EU / EEA only
- Licence
- Open source throughout
- Handover
- Your repository
The rest of this site is narrow on purpose: four categories of work we have shipped many times and can quote at a fixed price. Clients do not always need one of those, and this page covers the rest.
What this is for
Most requests for “something custom” turn out to be assembly problems rather than invention problems. The capability already exists in open source, but it is spread across three projects, none of which quite fits, and nobody has joined them up for your particular constraints.
Typical examples: an internal tool that has to talk to a twenty-year-old system nobody wants to touch; a reporting layer over data that lives in four places; a regulated workflow that no product models correctly; a device or protocol integration with no vendor behind it; a migration between two systems that were never meant to meet.
How it runs
We start with a discovery week rather than a quote, because quoting bespoke work from a description usually leaves both sides unhappy. At the end you get a written recommendation covering what exists already, what would have to be built, roughly what that costs, and whether it is worth doing at all.
The recommendation is often smaller than the request. Occasionally it is “buy the commercial product, it is cheaper than us”, and we put that in writing. The discovery is chargeable and self-contained, so that advice costs you a week rather than a project.
If we do build, the same rules apply as everywhere else on this site: open source throughout, hosted in Romania, Sweden or Germany, committed to your repository as we go, and handed over with runbooks. When we fix or extend an upstream project along the way, we contribute the change back so you are not maintaining a private fork forever.
What we will not take on
We are seven people with a specific set of skills, and hiring us for something outside them is a quick way to waste your money. We turn down native mobile applications, anything that needs a design team (we do not have one), machine learning research as opposed to applying existing models, and hardware engineering.
We also say no when an existing product already does the job well. That happens often enough that we mention it here.