Auction-management portal
An end-to-end internal portal for a national industrial-equipment auction operation — managing live auctions, lot pricing, currency conversion, and the team workflow around publishing.
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Custom web apps
Custom web apps
Internal portals, dashboards, customer-facing tools — built around the data and workflows your business already runs on.
When you need this
- Your team is moving data between three or four systems by hand every day.
- There's a tool you'd buy if it existed — but nothing on the market quite fits.
- A spreadsheet is doing the job of a real application, and people are afraid to touch it.
- You need a customer-facing portal that looks like part of your brand, not a generic SaaS tab.
- Your in-house team can build the next thing — but not this one, and not by next quarter.
What we do
- Internal portals (CRUD, role-based access, audit trails)
- Operational dashboards backed by your live data
- Customer-facing tools (logins, billing, file transfer, profile management)
- Backend APIs that your other systems can call
- Modern, mobile-friendly UIs without framework bloat
- Auth, sessions, RBAC, password reset — the boring stuff that has to work
How this gets built now
How I use AI coding agents on client work →
The scaffolding got cheap. The workflow didn't.
Logins, roles, the add-edit-list screens, admin tables, form validation, database migrations and the tests around them — that shape is the same in every internal portal, and it used to be a real fraction of the estimate. It isn't now, so a first build is smaller and something you shelved may pencil out. What didn't move: learning the exception one person has quietly worked around every Monday, and the server-side permission checks, backups, and alerting that only matter after launch.
Examples from real engagements
What this looks like
Real-estate enrichment portal
A custom workflow tool that takes in a CSV of leads, enriches each one against a third-party data API, and pushes the result into the CRM — replacing what was a copy-paste job across four browser tabs.
Operations + invoicing portal
A solo-consultant operations tool: clock in/out timer, time entries, project management, invoice generation with PDF export, client file dropbox, agreement generation. (We use it ourselves.)
Common questions
Questions people ask before starting
What does a custom internal tool actually cost?
Quotes for the same one-paragraph description routinely vary tenfold, which is why the range alone is not useful. I bill new work at $95 to $125 an hour; agency blended rates commonly land between $150 and $300, and offshore teams frequently quote $25 to $60. What matters more is that a first build is sized honestly and you only pay for the hours you need after it, rather than buying a retainer against work that may not exist.
Do I need a mobile app or a web app?
A web app, in most cases. It runs in any browser and installs to a phone home screen without an app store, which means no review queues, no provisioning, and no separate build to keep current. A native app earns its cost when you genuinely need offline capture, background location, or a hardware feature the browser cannot reach.
Will it work on a phone in the field?
Yes. The interfaces are mobile-friendly without framework bloat, which matters more than it sounds: the people entering data are often standing in a warehouse on a bad connection, and a tool that assumes a desk and fibre is a tool that gets filled in later from memory, if at all.
Who owns the code?
You do. The code, the data and the infrastructure are yours, and that includes the ability to hand the whole thing to another developer. A build you cannot leave is a subscription with extra steps.
Can it connect to the systems we already run?
Yes — that is usually most of the value. A portal that duplicates data you already hold elsewhere creates a second source of truth and a new argument. Backend APIs your other systems can call, and two-way links out to your CRM, accounting or inventory, are part of the same job.
Should I buy software instead of building it?
If a product exists that fits, buy it. A vendor spreads its development cost across every customer and no custom build will beat that on price, so this is the first question worth settling. The honest test is whether you would be changing how you work in order to suit the software. Adapting your process to a product is usually sensible and occasionally the entire problem, and only the second case is worth building for.
Need a web app built?
Tell me what you're trying to fix — I'll reply the same day.