Most businesses don't need another subscription. They need the one thing their industry's software never quite does — and they need the people building it to understand the job. We run an optical clinic, a lab and a rental portfolio on software we wrote ourselves. Yours gets built the same way.
If yours isn't on the list it probably still fits — these are just the ones that come up most.
The file everyone edits, nobody trusts, and one person understands. Jobs, inventory, scheduling, pricing — the same data, but with rules, history and more than one person able to use it at once.
Booking, quoting, order status, documents, payments. The questions your phone rings about all day, answered by a page they can open at 10pm instead.
Your accounting package, your supplier's ordering system, your booking tool, your payment provider. Re-typing the same information into three screens is a solvable problem.
Reading invoices, drafting replies, grading images, flagging the thing you'd otherwise miss on a Friday afternoon. Running on our own hardware, not a third party's. Narrow and checkable beats clever.
Records that hold up later: who did what, when, and what the numbers were at the time. We built deposit statements and clinical records under exactly this pressure.
A developer who vanished, an agency you've outgrown, a build that stalled. We start with a paid review of what's there, and tell you honestly whether it's worth keeping.
Nothing is open-ended, and nothing is priced after the fact.
About fifteen plain questions on our site, roughly five minutes. No sales call first. You see an hour range and a price range on the same screen, before you give us anything but an email address.
You get: a written spec and a ballpark.
We turn the spec into a fixed price with the features itemised, so you can see what each part costs and cut anything you don't want. Signed online. A 40% deposit starts the work; the balance is due at handover.
You get: a quote, an agreement and an invoice, all as PDFs.
At roughly 30% of the estimated build we send you a link to a working version — not a mock-up, the real thing with your data shape in it. This is the cheapest point at which to tell us we got something wrong.
You get: a private link, and a say before the expensive part.
You follow progress on your own project page and raise changes there. Anything that moves the price comes back as a change order you sign first — the number never drifts quietly.
You get: a live project page and a written trail of every decision.
Source code, a database export, deployment notes and an hour walking your people through it. Then hosting and support if you want it, or a clean exit if you don't.
You get: everything, in a form someone else could pick up.
We are a small shop, which cuts both ways: you deal with the person writing the code, and we can only run a handful of builds at once. If we're booked we'll say so rather than take the deposit and queue you.
These are the bands our own estimator produces. Yours is calculated from your actual answers, not picked off this page.
| Shape of the job | Build | Typical price | First look | Finished |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One tool, form or integration A booking form that writes to your system; one report that used to be manual. |
8–20 h | $1,000 – $2,500 | ~3 days | 1–2 weeks |
| A working internal system Job tracking, inventory, scheduling — several screens, real users, real rules. |
40–90 h | $5,000 – $11,250 | 1–2 weeks | 3–5 weeks |
| A customer-facing product Portal plus admin, payments, email, the parts your customers see. |
90–150 h | $11,250 – $18,750 | 2–3 weeks | 5–8 weeks |
| A full platform Something the size of the products listed further down this page. |
150–300 h | $18,750 – $37,500 | 3–5 weeks | 2–4 months |
Timings assume about 20 build hours a week on your project. Two builds at once is the exception, not the plan.
Hosting is optional and priced by what the software genuinely needs — not by how many staff you have.
1 vCPU, 1 GB memory, 20 GB disk on hardware we already run. Most small tools and booking systems land here, and there is no extra machine to pay for.
2 vCPU, 4 GB, 60 GB. The app and its database on a machine of their own, so nothing else on our network can affect them.
4 vCPU, 8 GB, 200 GB. Background jobs, a larger database, or enough traffic that a small box would feel it.
On our own GPU machine. No per-question fee — but it takes real capacity, and we'll tell you plainly if your volume is more than it should carry.
Some things are billed by whoever provides them, on your own account, not marked up by us: text messages (about a cent each, plus roughly $1.50 a month for the number), Google map loads, and card processing fees. Email is included.
Boring on purpose. Everything here is something a competent developer can pick up in a week, which matters more than novelty when the software has to last.
No page builders and no low-code platform underneath. That's not purism — it's so the thing can still be changed in three years without a rewrite, and so nobody else's pricing decision becomes your problem.
Each of these is in daily use in a business we're part of. That's the feedback loop — if it's clumsy, we're the ones who feel it.
The whole of an optical clinic: records, exams, lens ordering, lab integration, billing. Installed on the clinic's own server.
Lab ordering for optical: order entry, lens pricing grids, a rep portal and invoicing.
Rental management and a listings marketplace — tenancies, applications, ledgers and deposit statements that hold up.
Equity research: automated scanning, conviction scoring and tracked paper portfolios measured against the index.
The AI operations platform we run the business on — jobs, briefings and assistants on our own hardware.
A pre-read of retinal images inside Nexus. Narrow, cautious, and always a second opinion rather than a verdict.
You do. The source code, the database and the domain are yours. Host it with us or move it somewhere else — we hand over the code and a plain-English account of how it runs.
We bill at $125 an hour and quote a fixed price before anything is built. A single tool or integration is typically $1,000 to $2,500; a working internal system $5,000 to $11,250; a full platform $18,750 to $37,500. Answering the scoping questions gives you your own number in about five minutes.
We build about 20 hours a week on a project. You see a working version at roughly 30% of the estimate — usually one to three weeks in — and the finished build follows from there. Small tools are one to two weeks; a full platform is two to four months.
Small adjustments during the build are normal and usually free. Anything that moves the price comes back as a change order you sign before the work starts, so the number never changes without you agreeing to it.
Yes, as long as we can read the code and get it running. We start with a paid review — usually a few hours — and give you an honest verdict on whether it's worth keeping before you commit to anything bigger.
No. Hosting is $0 to $60 a month depending on what the software needs, and it's optional. If you'd rather run it on your own server or cloud account, we'll set it up there.
Not unless you ask for it. The AI features we build run on our own hardware in Alberta by default. Where a commercial model is genuinely better for a job we'll say so, and you decide.
You keep everything — code, a database export and the deployment notes. There's no per-seat licence, no key on our end to switch off, and no exit fee.
We're in Calgary and most of our clients are in Alberta, which means a real person can turn up if it matters. The work itself is remote-friendly and we build for businesses further afield too.
Fifteen or so plain questions about what you need. No phone call first, no salesperson, and a written spec and price range on the screen at the end. If it's not for you, close the tab — nothing happens.