Topics
Guides, grouped by the decision you're making
Every guide we've written, grouped by the decision you're making: what it costs, whether to build or keep renting, what to build first, and who to trust with it.
What Custom Software Actually Costs
Almost every conversation about custom software opens with the same question: what is this going to cost? The honest answer is that it depends — but it depends on a short list of things you can actually reason about. These guides break down where the money goes: scope, integrations, data migration, design, and the parts nobody quotes until they are already building. You will find price ranges for common project types, the difference between an hourly rate and a fixed price and why that difference matters more than the number attached to it, and how to read a quote closely enough to tell a real estimate from a hopeful one. If you want a number for your own project, the estimator gives you a range in a couple of minutes.
1 guideBuilding With AI — and Fixing What It Breaks
AI changed how software gets built and what it costs to build. It also created a new kind of problem: a prototype from Lovable, Bolt, v0 or Replit that looks finished, demos beautifully, and then comes apart the moment real users, real data, or a real payment flow touch it. These guides cover both halves. What AI coding tools are genuinely good at, where the wall usually shows up, and what it takes to turn a generated prototype into software you can run a business on — auth, data models, permissions, error handling, deploys, the unglamorous parts that decide whether it survives. If you built something yourself and got stuck, start here. Knowing which part is salvageable is usually worth more than starting over.
0 guidesOwn Your Software Instead of Renting It
Per-seat SaaS is a rental agreement. It is a fine deal early on and it quietly becomes a bad one the moment your headcount grows faster than your usage, or the tool stops fitting the way you actually work. These guides are about the math and the decision behind that switch: when replacing a subscription with software you own pays back, when it plainly does not, what you actually receive when you own the code, and how to think about migration, data, and the features you would be giving up. One of the projects in our work section is a power dialer that replaced a $30,000-a-year Kixie contract — same job, no seat licenses, owned outright. That is the shape of the trade.
0 guidesCustom Software by Industry
A dispatch board for an HVAC company and a case tracker for a law firm are the same kind of project and completely different software. What changes is not the technology — it is the workflow, the vocabulary, the compliance edges, and the three or four details that decide whether your team uses the thing or quietly goes back to the spreadsheet. These guides go vertical: what businesses in a given industry run on today, where the off-the-shelf tools stop fitting, what a custom build usually replaces first, and what that build tends to cost. If your industry is covered here you get a concrete picture of scope instead of a generic pitch. If it is not here yet, the closest neighbor is usually close enough to be useful.
0 guidesHow the Work Actually Gets Done
Most of the risk in a software project is not technical. It is the contract that never says who owns the code, the timeline that was never tied to anything real, the change order that lands in week six, and the handoff that never happens. These guides cover the parts of hiring a developer that nobody puts on a sales page: what fixed pricing does and does not cover, how to tell a realistic timeline from a sales number, what you should own and receive at the end — repositories, accounts, credentials, documentation — and the specific red flags worth walking away from. Read them before you sign anything, including with us. An owner who knows what to ask for is easier to build for.
1 guideMVP, Scope, and What to Build First
The most expensive decision in a software project is what goes into version one. Build too much and you spend months and a budget proving something three weeks would have told you; build too little and you ship something nobody can actually use. These guides are about drawing that line: how to cut scope without gutting the product, what belongs in an MVP for a real business tool as opposed to a consumer app, how to validate demand before anyone writes code, and how to write requirements clear enough that two different developers would quote the same thing. If you are staring at a feature list you cannot afford, this is the cluster that gets it down to something you can ship this quarter and extend later.
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