built to order
Custom software development company for US companies
The engineering is the same wherever you are. We replace the spreadsheet and the Access file with a service that has a schema, migrations and an audit log. What changes for a US client is the paperwork and the clock, so both go in writing before the work starts.
USA
18 days to a first working version
Shadow IT is struck through because it does not get ported. Once the process has an owner and a log, the private copies stop being worth maintaining.
Spreadsheets
Excel, an Access file, and a reconciliation someone does by hand each morning.
- spreadsheet + emailExcel · Outlook
- access.mdbAccess
- manual reconciliationpeople
- shadow ITunowned
A service
One domain service, one web client, a schema with migrations, an append-only log.
- domain serviceGo
- web clientTypeScript
- postgresschema + migrations
- audit logappend-only
18 days to a first working version
What actually changes when the client is American
- MSA with a statement of work per phase
- One master agreement, then a short SOW for each phase with its own deliverable, date and price. Every phase stands on its own and everything it produces is yours the moment it is paid. Governing law and venue are yours to set — we have signed under Delaware, New York and California law without arguing about it.
- IP assignment on payment, not on completion
- Work product transfers as each phase is paid, not at the end of the whole engagement. That matters if you are being acquired mid-project or if your board wants the asset on the books this quarter: there is no window where you have paid for code you do not yet own.
- Overlap written as a number
- Four hours of overlap with US Eastern and three with Pacific, in the SOW as a commitment rather than as a promise to try. Standups land inside your morning. Anything urgent outside that window goes to a named engineer, not to a shared inbox.
- W-9, insurance and vendor onboarding
- We go through procurement the way any US vendor does: W-9 on file, certificates of insurance, security questionnaire, vendor portal. We do not hold SOC 2 or ISO certification and will say so on the form rather than around it — what we do hold is the ability to run entirely inside your perimeter, air-gapped, on your hardware or ours.
- Your data does not have to leave the country
- If residency is a requirement, the work runs in your cloud account in a US region, or on machines in your building. The models come from us and run there with no outbound connection. This is the usual arrangement for anything touching regulated records, and it is a configuration rather than a negotiation.
- Fixed price, not time and materials
- Each phase is priced before it starts, from the assessment that precedes it. Change orders exist for scope you add, not for our estimate being wrong. That is the practical difference between buying an outcome and renting people.
How the work goes
- 01days 1–2
Watch the work happen
We sit with the people doing it and read the formulas in their spreadsheet. The exceptions they handle without thinking are the ones that break a build on day fifteen.
- 02days 2–5
Model the data and settle the rules
Schema, states, who is allowed to change what. This is where the arguments happen, and having them here costs a fraction of having them the day before you go live.
- 03days 4–12
Build one path end to end
A complete path from input to report, in production, used by people who do the job. A demo environment tells you nothing about whether the thing is usable.
- 04days 11–18
Migrate and turn the old file off
Import the history, run both for a period, then remove write access to the spreadsheet. A system nobody is required to leave never gets left.
What the platform does, what a person does
| What the platform does, what a person does | Who does it | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Reading the existing Access queries and Excel formulas | Platform | They come out as readable rules anyone in the room can confirm at a glance. |
| Deciding which rules are real and which are habits | Engineer | Only your people know that the Tuesday exception exists because of one supplier. |
| Service, schema and migrations | Platform | Generated from the agreed model, then reviewed line by line before it lands. |
| The screens people live in | Both | The daily path gets designed by a person. The admin forms around it do not need one. |
| Importing and reconciling the history | Both | Loading is mechanical. Deciding what to do with rows that never balanced is not. |
| Cutover plan | Engineer | Which date, who is on call, what the rollback is. |
The team that builds it
More than ten years on other people's systems and dozens of migrations delivered: Access and Excel processes, VB6 and Delphi clients, PHP monoliths, AS/400 policy administration, plant floors held together by macros. Scheduling, claims, billing, inventory, dispatch, reporting. We have built all of it before, and the shape of the work repeats far more than anyone expects.
The assessment is the cheap way to see this for yourself. Bounded work with a written output: the data model as we understand it, the rules we pulled out of your spreadsheet, and a phased plan with prices against it.
Questions we get from engineers
- Can you sign our MSA instead of yours?
- Usually yes. The clauses we look at first are IP assignment timing, liability cap versus contract value, and whether the non-solicit is mutual. If your paper is standard we sign it; if something in it makes a fixed-price phase impossible we say which clause and why, in the redline, not on a call.
- Do you have US entities and can you invoice in dollars?
- Invoicing is in dollars, and the payment terms are whatever your AP department runs — net 30 is the common one. If your procurement requires a domestic counterparty for the contract itself, say so early: it changes the paperwork, not the price or the date.
- Who is actually on the project, and where do they sit?
- Engineers, not account managers, and the person who answers your questions is the one reading your code. Where they sit depends on what your rules require: fully remote is the default, inside your VPN is common, and on-site for the parts that need it is arranged when the contract asks for it.
- What happens to the code and the tests when we finish?
- Ordinary repositories in your organisation from the first commit, not a handover at the end. Tests written against the behaviour of the original system, the map of the codebase kept current, and a runbook. Nothing calls back to us at runtime and there is nothing to keep renting.
- Thirty days for real, on a system this size?
- Thirty days is the ceiling for a project, and most of what we take is under twenty. The platform reads the whole codebase in parallel before an engineer writes a line, which is the part that used to take a team a quarter. If your system genuinely does not fit, you hear the phase plan and the number for the first phase instead of a padded estimate.
Show us the spreadsheet
Send the shape of the process and how many people touch it. Back comes what the assessment covers, how long the build takes and what it costs. Eighteen days later it is running.
The first reply comes from an engineer, usually asking who owns the process today.