Software written around how you actually work

An off-the-shelf tool is quick to start with and cheap for the first year. Then you hit the wall. You cannot add a step the vendor did not foresee, the subscription grows with every extra person, and your data sits with someone else.

Software written around your company reverses that. It does exactly what your process does, with no working around it. You are not paying for eighty features nobody opened. The code is yours, so nobody can raise the price of reaching your own data.

It does not pay off for everyone and we say so plainly. If your process looks the same as it does in a thousand other companies, an off-the-shelf tool will be cheaper and faster. It starts making sense where the process is specific enough that a box cannot handle it.

Almost every enquiry we get falls into one of these three. It is worth spotting yours, because it decides where we start.

1. 1The spreadsheet stopped scalingThe company grew and Excel is splitting. Four copies of the same file, locking when two people work at once, formulas nobody understands any more, and one person who knows how it all hangs together. The biggest risk there is not technical, it is that person leaving.
2. 2Old software nobody maintainsSomething bought or written years ago. It runs, but the author is gone, there is no documentation, nothing new can be added, and every change in the company needs a workaround in a spreadsheet next to it.
3. 3Several systems that do not talkSales in one, stock in another, accounting in a third. Someone retypes data between them by hand, several times a day. This is the most common case and usually the fastest to pay for itself.

If it is purely about retyping data between systems, it is sometimes cheaper to go for automation without building a new system, and that is what we will tell you.

We do not build software alongside what you have. We build software that switches specific chores off. The ones on the left disappear from the working day.

We close this list on the free call, against your processes. Anything not on it is usually not worth building in the first stage.

This is the stage where whole projects fall over. Real data is always more broken than the description suggests, so we take it on early rather than at the end.

1. 1We take your real file, not a sampleNot ten example rows, the whole spreadsheet or a database dump. Only the full set shows the empty fields, the two date formats in one column and the customers entered three different ways.
2. 2We show you what does not add upYou get a list of everything ambiguous before we save anything. Some of it can be cleaned automatically, some needs your call, because only you know which version is the right one.
3. 3Import with a preview, line by lineLoading happens in the browser, with an editable preview and a check on every line before saving. You see what will go in before it goes in. The same mechanism stays in the software for everyday use when a client sends you a file.
4. 4The old way keeps running alongsideFor the first few weeks we do not ask anyone to switch the spreadsheet off overnight. Both run side by side until the team stops going back to the old one on its own.

Data comes out as easily as it went in. Export exists from day one, so nobody feels locked inside software they paid for.

Software running inside a company needs looking after. Regulations, browsers, rates and people all change. The question of who maintains it belongs before the start, not a year later.

Here it is maintained by the same people who wrote the code. There is no handover to another team and no account manager in between. The first 30 days after go-live are included in the project, and fixes in that window cost nothing extra.

After that you can take a care plan or skip it entirely. The code is yours, so maintenance can go to your own developer or another company. That is not a slogan, it follows from you getting the repository at the start.

• 490 złCare Basicper month, small fixes and keeping everything running
• 990 złCare Proper month, plus small new features each month
• 1 990 złCare Scaleper month, for systems used across several departments

What each level covers exactly is set out on the page about ongoing care after launch.

Software written around your company can grow with it, but only if it was written on that assumption from the start. Here is what we do early so nobody has to start over in two years.

• More people arriveRoles and permissions are built in from the first version, even when three people use it at launch. Adding the fourth and the fortieth looks the same, because there is no per-seat charge here.
• Another department arrivesThe second and third process attach to the existing foundation rather than sitting beside it. That is why we design the first stage to be extendable, even when the client does not yet know which way they will go.
• More data arrivesA database that copes fine with a thousand records can choke at two hundred thousand. Queries and indexes get written for the target scale straight away, because it costs nothing at the start and costs a rewrite later.
• A second site arrivesSeparating data across plants or companies is easy when it was considered at the beginning and very expensive when bolted on years later. We ask about it on the first call even when there is only one site today.

A precast concrete manufacturer, REJMAN. Multi-item orders travelled on paper notes between the office and the production hall, with each order collecting many items in different sizes, materials and deadlines. Orders were retyped by hand from files clients sent in.

We built Relay, laid out across three views because that is what a day in a concrete plant looks like. The office runs orders and priorities, the hall sees its own jobs on a tablet with live updates, and the import module loads many orders at once from CSV, TSV and Excel files or pasted text, with a preview and a check on every line before saving.

We put this honestly, because the rollout is still under way. The office already works in Relay, and the hall view starts once the hardware arrives. The whole thing runs on the client's own server, and the code belongs to REJMAN.

• 0 notesorders in one system, not on the desk
• secondsimport instead of retyping by hand
• officealready working in Relay
• in progresshall view starts once hardware arrives

We wrote the whole rollout up as the Relay case study, including the client's reference letter.

Pieces answering the questions we get most often before a first call.

• Fixed price or hourly →How to settle a project so it does not end in top-up invoices.
• How much does an MVP cost →Market ranges and what pushes the price up.
• What you can build in 4 to 8 weeks →What realistically fits into the first month of work.