service 05
Complex Software
Platforms, internal tools and data systems where the hard part is not the screens. If you have the idea, the budget and the commitment to build it, working out how is our job rather than yours.
- Timeline
- Scoped after the first spike, never before it
- Starts at
- From $15K
- Works with
- Platforms, Internal tools, Data systems, Integrations
The brief nobody wants is the one worth taking. Most shops price the risk by declining it; we would rather scope it honestly and then go and do it.
what you get
01
We take the unknowns
You are not asked to specify what you do not know yet. We name the unknowns, put the riskiest one first, and prove it before anything is built on top of it.
02
A spike before an estimate
Where a brief depends on something nobody has verified, we build the smallest thing that settles it. An estimate written before that is fiction with a number attached.
03
Production from the first week
Deployed, monitored and reviewable on a real URL from the start. A build that only runs on a developer's machine has not been de-risked, it has been postponed.
04
Built to be handed on
Your repository, your infrastructure, your keys, documented as we go. The measure of the work is whether another team could pick it up without us.
process
- 01
Sit with the problem
Before scope, before stack. Usually the brief as written is a solution someone already chose, and the actual constraint is somewhere else.
- 02
Kill the biggest risk
One spike against the thing most likely to break the build. It either clears or it changes the plan, and both outcomes are worth more than a longer document.
- 03
Build in slices
End to end, thinnest useful path first, in production. You are never holding a half-built thing that has not run.
- 04
Harden and hand over
Load, failure paths, monitoring, the runbook for the night it breaks. Then a walkthrough with whoever owns it next.
deliverables
- Working software in your own repository
- Infrastructure and deploy pipeline
- Architecture notes and decision log
- Monitoring, alerting and a runbook
- Handover sessions with your team
questions
Anything where the answer is not known at the start: a system nobody has built this way, a migration off something load-bearing, an integration against an API that does not behave as documented, or a rescue of a build that stalled.
Yes, and we will say so out loud. What we will not do is take the budget and discover it in month three. The spike exists so that the risk is priced before you commit to the whole build.
Usually the better arrangement. We take the part nobody has bandwidth or appetite for, in your repository, to your conventions, and your team keeps ownership.
A decision maker who can answer questions inside a day, access to the systems involved, and a budget that matches the ambition. The engineering is ours.
Need thisbuilt?
Complex Software engagements start at From $15K. Tell us the scope and we will come back with a fixed number.