- How do I know you are not just selling development hours?
- Because the first stage is an attempt to talk ourselves out of the work. We try to configure your process in a product you can buy, and the stage ends in a written recommendation either way. We earn no licence commission on whatever we point you towards, so nothing tilts the answer. When a build genuinely is needed, the document says which part and why.
- What does a custom build cost to keep running?
- Plan for a share of the build cost every year, permanently. Servers, security patches, keeping pace with whatever it connects to, and changes when the business changes. That figure belongs in the decision at the start rather than surfacing in year two. It is the main reason we push configured products first: the vendor carries most of that burden instead of you.
- Who owns the code if we stop working with you?
- You do, from the first commit. The repository sits under your account, the licence is yours outright, and we hold no key that switches anything off. If you move to another firm we hand over the same package we would give a new engineer of ours: source, tests, runbook and a walkthrough call. There is no exit fee and no credential we keep back.
- Our last custom project was abandoned halfway. Why is this different?
- Usually the first working version was scheduled for month nine, so nobody saw anything until most of the budget had gone. We put a running slice on real data early and argue every later decision against a screen. If the idea is wrong, it fails in week six, when stopping costs almost nothing and the lesson is still affordable.
- Can you build a mobile app for our site teams?
- Yes, and the first question is whether the crew has signal and clean hands. Field apps fail on practical detail: a form of thirty fields nobody finishes, a photo upload that dies on a weak connection, a login that expires in a basement. We design short forms that capture offline and sync when the phone finds a network again.
