Custom software for small businesses - without the agency price tag
Off-the-shelf software is built for everyone, which means it's built for no one. So your team bends its work around the tool, keeps a spreadsheet on the side, and fills the gaps by hand.
The alternatives haven't been great either. A dev shop quotes $20,000-$50,000 and ten weeks, ships it, and leaves. A no-code platform hands you a canvas and makes your ops lead the builder. Neither is what small people businesses - agencies, accountants, lawyers, consultants, recruiters - actually want, which is simpler: the tool that fits how we work, built by someone who stays.
That's what we do. We build the custom software your firm actually needs and keep improving it on a monthly plan - at a price that used to buy a junior developer, delivered by a senior one.
We built our first tools for the Fame team - a 6-year-old people business with 100+ clients. They now give those hours back every week.
Read the Fame story →What we build
The tools every people business ends up needing - agencies, accounting firms, law firms, consultancies - shaped to your workflow, not a template:
Client portals
One branded place for deliverables, files, invoices and updates
Client onboarding systems
One link for new clients; everything lands where your team works
Custom CRMs and pipeline tools
When HubSpot's model doesn't match how you actually sell
Internal dashboards
Capacity, hours, pipeline, margin, live
Status pages
Clients see progress; the "any update?" emails stop
Reporting tools
Reports that draft themselves from your data, reviewed by a person
App-to-app sync
Your CRM, accounting software and practice tool finally agree
Document and intake processing
Forms, transcripts and PDFs turned into structured records
What custom software really costs
Most dev shops won't publish this. We will, because small businesses deserve to filter on price before a sales call.
| What you need | Typical cost | Typical time |
|---|---|---|
| A single automation or integration | $2,000-5,000 / £1,600-4,000 | 1-2 weeks |
| A dashboard, portal or onboarding system | $8,000-18,000 / £6,000-14,000 | 2-6 weeks |
| A custom CRM or multi-part internal tool | $15,000-30,000 / £12,000-24,000 | 4-10 weeks |
| Monitoring, fixes and improvements (the run plan) | $2,000-7,500 / £1,600-6,000 a month | Ongoing |
Two things most quotes leave out. First, the build is the smaller cost over time - looking after and improving the tool is where the real work and the real value is, which is why we price it as a monthly plan instead of pretending it's free. Second, we start every project with a two-week ops audit ($2,500 / £2,000, credited to your first month), so you know exactly what you need and what it costs before committing to anything bigger.
(Ranges are typical for people businesses of 10-60 people; the audit gives you a fixed price for your builds.)
How we keep it affordable
Three things, and none of them is "cheap offshore developers."
One senior engineer, working with AI
AI does the first drafts and the boilerplate; a senior engineer designs, reviews and owns the result. The output is a senior build at a fraction of the old hours.
A library built for people businesses
We've already built portals, onboarding, status pages, reporting and sync for firms like yours. We start from that and shape it to you, instead of starting from a blank page every time.
We look after it ourselves
No maintenance retainer with a different vendor, nobody on your team becoming the part-time admin. It's one monthly plan.
Custom vs off-the-shelf: when custom pays
Buy off-the-shelf when a mainstream tool does 90% of what you need and your process can flex to fit it. Go custom when the gap is costing you hours every week, when you're running a spreadsheet alongside the "real" system, when two apps refuse to talk, or when your clients' experience depends on it. The ops audit answers this honestly - sometimes the right answer is "buy this $40/month tool," and we'll tell you.
We build it and run it
Here's the difference from a dev shop: we don't hand you a codebase and leave. We decide what to build with you from the audit, build and test it, then roll it out - training your team and managing the change so people actually use it. The software lives in your own accounts, and we keep looking after it - we monitor it, fix it when an app you depend on changes, and keep improving it as your firm changes. And we set up usage tracking so you can see who's actually using what we built - because a tool nobody uses isn't custom software, it's an expensive spreadsheet.
Questions, answered plainly
How much does custom software cost for a small business?
Typically $2,000-5,000 for a single automation, $8,000-18,000 for a portal, dashboard or onboarding system, and $15,000-30,000 for a custom CRM or multi-part tool - plus a monthly run plan from $2,000 to look after and improve it. We publish all of this and give you a fixed price after a two-week audit.
Custom software vs off-the-shelf - when does custom pay off?
When the gap between the tool and how you work is costing real hours every week, when you're running spreadsheets alongside the system, or when apps won't talk to each other. If a mainstream tool genuinely fits, we'll tell you to buy it.
How long does it take?
A single automation in 1-2 weeks; a portal or dashboard in 2-6 weeks; a larger tool in 4-10 weeks. The two-week audit comes first.
Who looks after it?
We do, on a monthly run plan. Training your team, monitoring, fixes and improvements are included. It runs on your own accounts, so you own it, and you pay those tool costs directly.
Do we own the software?
Yes - you own what we build for you. It runs on your own accounts and we look after it there; if you ever want someone else to take it on, you can.