Tools your team actually uses.
Internal dashboards, customer portals, workflow automations. Built to fit how you actually work, not how SaaS thinks you should.
Your team is fighting the tools.
Spreadsheets that nobody trusts. SaaS that fits 70%. Manual hand-offs that break the moment someone's on PTO. The drag isn't drama, it's compounding tax on every hour worked.
average weekly time on manual data work, per team member. Five tabs deep, two macros, one person who knows how it works.
Internal client benchmark
average stack a 30-person team carries to do one cross-functional process. Per-seat math grows linear; integration drift grows worse.
Internal client benchmark
of staff time lost to context-switching between tools. The customer waits, the order stalls, the team blames the workflow.
McKinsey · 2024
Five shapes most of our builds take.
Most projects we ship are one of these. Yours might be a mix.
Internal operations dashboard.
One place for the team to see what matters. KPIs, recent activity, anomalies, the work queue for today. Replaces 3 to 5 different SaaS views.
- Revenue + orders + pipeline tiles
- Activity timeline across tools
- Anomaly alerts in Slack
- Task queue for today
Customer portal.
A login your customers actually use. Account view, invoices, support, project status. Branded, embedded, owned.
Workflow automation.
The hand-off that breaks every Friday, automated. Triggers, conditions, side effects, audit trail. Done in code, not Zapier.
Inventory or scheduling app.
The tool that does exactly what your operation needs. Books, schedules, allocates, tracks. No SaaS that fits 70%.
Reporting + exports.
Numbers your finance or board needs, generated automatically. Plumbed into the data already in the app, not pulled by hand.
Five steps. Live in two weeks.
Most of our app engagements have an MVP in production after the first two weeks. The rest is iteration against real usage.
Map the workflow.
Sit with the team doing the work. Capture the steps, the friction, the wishlist. Decide what the MVP actually needs.
Sketch the screens.
Low-fidelity flows first, then a working prototype your team can click through. No surprises before code starts.
Two-week MVP.
Postgres + Next.js + Tailwind. Production-grade from the first deploy. Real auth, real data, no demo-only shortcuts.
Real usage, weekly.
Your team uses it live. We watch, capture friction, ship the next set of changes. The loop is short.
Live and refined.
Real users, real friction, real changes shipped. The product gets sharper every week it runs.
A recent operations dashboard.
A redacted excerpt from a recent build. Replaced four SaaS subscriptions and three spreadsheets for a 30-person team.
Spec
One page that captures what the app does, who uses it, and the workflow it replaces. The reference every PR points back to.
A single dashboard for ops, sales and finance. Replaces 4 SaaS subscriptions and 3 spreadsheets. MVP live in 2 weeks, refined live for the rest of the engagement.
Three things the spec names:
One workflow, end to end. The customer object is the same across the dashboard, the customer portal, and the invoice export.
Postgres, not Airtable. Auditable schemas, real backups, no per-row pricing surprises.
Built around real usage. We sit with the team using it weekly and ship the changes that earn it.
Questions we hear most.
If yours isn't here, ask. We'll answer plainly.
Why custom and not off-the-shelf SaaS?
When SaaS fits, use SaaS. We will tell you straight after the discovery call. Custom earns its keep when the workflow is specific, the per-seat math breaks, or three SaaS tools could be replaced by one app you own.
What stack do you build on?
Next.js + TypeScript + Tailwind on the front. Postgres + Drizzle on the back. Hosted on Vercel or Fly.io. Auth via Clerk or Auth.js. Open-source, swappable per project.
How long is the engagement?
MVP in 2 weeks. Iteration depending on scope, typically 6 to 10 weeks for the full hand-over. We agree the shape upfront and ship in two-week increments.
Can it integrate with our existing CRM / billing / etc?
Yes. Most apps we ship integrate with Stripe, HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack, your warehouse, your auth provider. We do the wiring; you keep the data.
What if our needs change after launch?
They will. We can stay on retainer to iterate. We agree the shape and the cadence upfront.
Tools built around your team.
A short call to see if a custom app is the right next move. If it isn't, we'll tell you what is.