What we build
The five jobs that come up over and over.
-
Two systems that won’t talk to each other
from $900
Orders land in one system, invoices live in another, and somebody spends part of every day retyping between the two. That person usually knows it’s a waste and has no way out of it. This is the cheapest thing on the list and often the one that pays for itself first.
-
The spreadsheet that turned into the business
from $1,500
It started as a way to track one thing. Now it does quoting and scheduling and half of payroll, it’s thirty tabs deep, and one person understands the formulas. When that person is on vacation, work slows down. It becomes something the rest of the team can use without breaking it, and the logic you already worked out stays — swapping it for somebody else’s is how these projects go wrong. What nobody can tell you before opening the file is how much of that logic is actually in the formulas and how much of it lives in the head of whoever built it, and that difference is most of what decides how long the job takes.
-
Internal tools and dashboards
from $1,500
Somebody spends Monday morning pulling numbers out of four different places and pasting them into a report nobody opens until Thursday. The machine does the pulling instead, and the report becomes one screen that’s correct whenever you happen to look at it.
-
Customer-facing builds
from $1,500
Booking flows, quote calculators, a portal where your customers can look up their own jobs. These cost more than a website does because there is real logic underneath (who can book what, when, at what price, and what happens when two people want the same Tuesday), and that logic is where this kind of project usually goes wrong.
-
Rescues
from $900
The developer stopped answering email. Or the site is held together by eleven plugins and updating any one of them breaks checkout. We read what’s actually there and tell you whether it’s worth saving. Sometimes it isn’t, and you’ll hear that in the first week rather than the sixth.
Bigger jobs start at $5,000 and get quoted exactly the same way. We’ve built and still run systems well past anything on this list, so if what you need doesn’t fit the five, describe it anyway and we’ll work out what it actually is.
How it works
How a job actually goes.
-
A half-hour call, no charge.
You don’t need a spec written up first. Describe what’s going wrong and how it gets handled today, and we’ll ask enough questions to price it. If there’s already a product that does this for forty dollars a month, that’s what you’ll hear, and the call ends there with everybody better off.
-
A quote you can hold us to.
Usually within two business days you get a document saying what is being built, what it costs and when it will be finished. The number doesn’t move unless you change what you asked for, and if you do change it, the new number reaches you before the work happens rather than after. Half up front, half on delivery.
-
You end up owning it.
Most of these take one or two weeks. When it’s finished the code is yours, the hosting account is in your name, and there is no monthly fee to anybody for the privilege of running software you already paid for. Anything that breaks in the first thirty days gets fixed, and that isn’t a support contract, it’s just what finishing the job means.
Only two or three of these run at once, so there are stretches where the honest answer is a three-week wait before anything starts. You’ll hear that on the call, not after you’ve signed something.
Proof
The bigger systems we build and run.
-
A manufacturing company runs on software we built.
It takes a job from a 3D design through to shop drawings, a cut list and a cost, all off the same data, so nothing gets redrawn or retyped on the way. It’s in daily production use. If it stops, the shop stops, and having already carried that kind of dependency counts for more here than anything on a résumé.
-
We built the platform we run everything else on.
Code hosting, code review, the automated test and deploy pipelines, all of it built in-house and now hosting its own source. That was not a sensible thing to do and we would talk a client out of it. It does mean the boring parts of your project, getting it onto a server and putting changes out without breaking anything, are things that happen here several times a week rather than things anybody will be working out as they go.
-
The servers are ours. So is the AI infrastructure.
There’s a gateway here that routes work between our own machines and GPUs rented by the second, and switches the rented ones off when nothing is using them, because we are the ones paying for them. Hosting, backups, and the part where you find out whether a backup actually restores: those happen on our own systems every week, so they aren’t something anybody would be learning on yours.
Your project will be one of the smaller things built here this year, and that is precisely why it can be finished in two weeks for two thousand dollars.
What’s included
What’s included that usually isn’t.
-
You talk to whoever is building it.
Whoever quotes the job writes it and puts it on a server. Nothing is relayed through an account manager, so you never get the version of an answer that has already been through two people who don’t code.
-
Explanations you can actually use.
You should expect to understand what was built and why it was built that way, in language that doesn’t assume you write software for a living. If you don’t, that is a problem on our side to fix rather than yours to study for. Software that nobody at your company understands is software you will be paying somebody to touch for as long as you own it.
-
Deployment is part of the job.
A lot of contract work ends the moment the code runs on a developer’s laptop, and then the client discovers that getting it onto the internet is a second project nobody quoted. Here the job finishes at the point where it is running on a server, the passwords are in your hands, and there are notes explaining how to keep it alive.
-
We work alongside in-house developers.
Not every job here is for a company without a developer. Sometimes it’s overflow, or a well-defined piece nobody has a spare month for, or a second pair of eyes on something that’s been stuck a while. We’ll write to your conventions in your stack, and we won’t spend the first week telling you what’s wrong with them.
-
Why it costs what it costs.
Two thousand dollars used to buy a template and an afternoon. It buys more now. AI tooling has made the mechanical part of writing software genuinely fast, and the last two years here have gone into building tooling on top of that rather than reading about other people doing it. What it has not made faster — and this is where the low price gets misread as thin work — is deciding what to build, which is settled long before anyone opens an editor and is where a project of this size is usually won or lost. That part still needs somebody who has done it before, and it is the thing you are actually paying for.
Questions
The questions that come up on every call.
-
Do you use AI?
Sometimes, and it is part of how a small budget buys software this complete, this quickly. It is only part of the picture. An experienced developer designs and builds your project, works directly with the code, and is answerable for everything that ships.
-
Will you sign an NDA?
Yes, and it is a normal thing to ask for rather than an awkward one. Send yours before the call if you would rather talk freely on it.
-
What happens if you stop working on it?
This is the right question to ask anybody you hire, and most of the answer is decided before the work starts rather than after. You own the code and the accounts, it runs on infrastructure in your name, and it is handed over with notes explaining how it fits together. Any competent developer can pick it up. The reason to build it that way is not that we expect to disappear — it is that software you cannot hand to somebody else is software with a single point of failure in it, and that point is a person.
-
What if I need changes after the thirty days?
Small changes are usually small money and get quoted the same way as everything else. There is no retainer to keep, and nothing stops working if you never call again.
-
What if I don’t know exactly what I want yet?
Almost nobody does, and turning up with a half-formed idea is the normal way this starts. Describe the part of the week that goes badly. Working out what to build from that is most of the job, and it happens on the call, before there is a price attached to anything.
-
Do you work with businesses outside Ohio?
Yes. Nearly all of this is remote and always has been, and the projects on this page span several states. On-site visits happen when a job genuinely needs somebody standing in the room, which is rarer than people expect.
Tell us what’s broken.
Half an hour, no charge, and nobody is going to try to talk you into anything. Describe what’s going wrong and roughly how it gets handled today, and you’ll get a straight answer on whether software is even the right fix, and what it would run you if it is.