The process lives in a spreadsheet
It has forty tabs, three people are afraid to touch it, and one of them wrote it. It works right up until two people open it at once, or the person who built it leaves.
When the tool you need does not exist, or the one you bought does two thirds of the job, the answer is usually custom software. That is a much bigger promise than a website, so it is fair to ask whether the people making it have ever actually done it. We have — our own product is in production with paying customers.
Fixed-scope first phase · Your repository · No lock-in
Custom software is the expensive option and usually the wrong one. These are the situations where it stops being wrong.
It has forty tabs, three people are afraid to touch it, and one of them wrote it. It works right up until two people open it at once, or the person who built it leaves.
Each does part of it, none talks to the others, and somebody re-types the same data between them every week. The subscriptions add up to more than the thing would have cost to build.
Off-the-shelf tools rarely model who is allowed to see what in the way your business actually works. So the answer becomes 'give everyone access and trust them', which holds until it does not.
You bought software that fits eighty percent of how you work, and built habits around the missing twenty. Those habits now cost more per year than the software does.
Not prototypes, not slide decks, not a proof of concept that needs rebuilding before anyone can use it.
The system your team actually uses all day — quoting, scheduling, approvals, case management. Built around how the work really flows rather than how an off-the-shelf product assumes it does.
Real access control, enforced at the database rather than hidden in the interface. Who can see which rows is a data question, and answering it in the front end is how leaks happen.
Your CRM, accounting, booking system and inbox each hold part of the picture. We connect them so the data moves itself, with retries and alerts for when someone else's API has a bad day.
The part nobody sees and everything depends on. A schema designed for the questions you will ask in three years, not just the screen you asked for this month.
Numbers pulled, cleaned and presented on a schedule, so the weekly meeting starts with facts rather than someone apologising for the spreadsheet.
Reading unstructured input — emails, PDFs, notes — and turning it into structured action. Drafting prose a human approves. Never deciding something that has to be exactly right.
AI is excellent at reading messy input and drafting language. It is the wrong tool for anything where the answer must be right every time. In our own HR product, payroll and severance follow statutory formulas in code — the language model never touches the arithmetic. We build client software the same way.
Your repository, your cloud accounts, your database, your domain. We work inside them rather than holding them. If you leave, there is nothing to migrate and nothing to negotiate — a documented handover and you are gone.
Access rules belong in the database, where they apply no matter what calls it. Enforcing permissions only in the interface means the first person to open a browser console can read everything.
Scoped in phases, so you are never approving a number that has no shape.
We talk about the work you are trying to fix. If off-the-shelf software already solves it, we will tell you which one and you can stop reading. That happens more often than you would expect from someone selling development.
A first phase small enough to judge — the core thing working end to end, not every feature on the list. Priced before we start, with what is explicitly not included written down beside it.
Commits land in your repository from day one and you can see it running as it comes together. No three-month silence ending in a reveal that turns out to be the wrong thing.
Deployed, documented and monitored. Software rots — dependencies age, APIs change, volumes grow — so ongoing maintenance is a real part of the offer rather than an afterthought.
İKAsistan is a Turkish HR platform we designed, built and run. Nine tools that turn repetitive legal and payroll work into guided processes, used by real companies and billed monthly. Next.js and Supabase, row-level security enforced in Postgres, Claude for document drafting, deterministic code for every calculation.
It is the clearest answer to a fair question: can the people you are about to hire actually ship and operate software, or do they only advise on it? Everything in that case study is checkable on the live product.
Read the İKAsistan case studyMore than a website and less than most people fear. The first phase is fixed-price and quoted before we start, based on a written scope — typically a few weeks of work rather than a few months. We do not publish a range here because a number chosen before understanding the problem would be a guess, and you would be right not to trust it.
Very often, yes, and we will say so. If an existing product solves eighty percent of it and the missing twenty is genuinely optional, buying is cheaper and faster. Custom becomes the right answer when the missing part is the part that makes your business different.
Next.js and TypeScript on the front, Postgres behind it, usually via Supabase. Not because they are fashionable but because we run our own product on them and know where the sharp edges are. If you already have a stack and a team, we work in yours rather than insisting on ours.
You can, at any point, and nothing needs unpicking. The code is in your repository, the database is in your account, and the documentation is written for a developer who has never met us. Agencies that keep clients by making leaving painful are the reason people distrust this industry.
We use AI tooling as part of how we work, the same way we use a compiler and a test suite — and every line is reviewed by a person who is accountable for it. What we will not do is let a model make decisions that must be deterministic, or ship code nobody has read.
Us, if you want that — monitoring and maintenance is a monthly plan. Or your own developer, which is why the handover includes schema, migrations and documentation rather than just a repository link. Both are fine. Being unable to leave is not.
It lives in your accounts, under your control, and we hold no copy of it. Access control is enforced at the database layer, encryption applies in transit and at rest, and nothing is used for any purpose beyond the job it was collected for.
Sometimes. We will read it first and tell you honestly whether it is worth continuing or whether you are better off rebuilding — and if the honest answer is that it is fine and just needs maintenance, that is what we will say rather than selling you a rewrite.
An hour on a call and we will tell you whether this needs custom software, whether something off the shelf already does it, and roughly what the first phase would take. If the answer is that you do not need us, that is what you will hear.
Start the conversationNo commitment · No sales sequence · A straight answer