Custom Business Software
Replace the subscription that costs too much or does too little — with software built for how your business actually works.
What a replacement build actually is
It is not an enterprise project and it is not a rewrite of everything you own. It is one focused application that does the specific job your current tool charges you for and still gets wrong — built once, sized to your business, and handed to you at the end.
Most of my clients are small businesses paying somewhere between $200 and $2,000 a month across a stack of tools, where one or two of those line items are doing far less than their price suggests.
What I replace
These are the categories that come up again and again — general-purpose products stretched to fit a business they were never shaped for.
Project & work management
Monday.com, Asana, ClickUp and Trello priced per user. Replaced with a board that models your actual stages instead of generic columns, for everyone in the company at no per-head cost.
CRM and pipeline
Salesforce and HubSpot tiers where the feature you need sits two plans above the one you can justify. Replaced with the fields, stages and reports your sales process really uses.
Scheduling & dispatch
Job scheduling and crew dispatch tools that charge per technician. Replaced with scheduling that understands your service areas, skills and travel time.
Inventory & operations
Airtable bases and spreadsheet stacks that grew into a system nobody designed. Replaced with a real application, with validation, history and permissions.
Invoicing & quoting add-ons
The paid add-ons bolted onto QuickBooks, Toast or Square to produce a quote, a work order or a report. Replaced with something that talks to the accounting system you're keeping.
Customer & staff portals
Per-seat portals where you pay for every customer or contractor who needs to log in. Replaced with a portal priced on nothing at all, because you own it.
When you should not replace a tool
I turn down work over this regularly, and I would rather say it here than halfway through a proposal. Custom software is the wrong answer when the thing you're buying is a commodity, a compliance burden, or a network.
Keep paying for these
- Payroll and tax filing. The rules change constantly and the penalty for being wrong is legal, not inconvenient.
- Core accounting. Your accountant knows QuickBooks or Xero. Replacing the general ledger buys you nothing and costs you an audit trail.
- Email, calendars and file storage. Commodity, cheap, and someone else's problem to keep online.
- Payment processing. Compliance-heavy and genuinely hard. Integrate with it; don't rebuild it.
- Anything cheap that works. A $30/month tool doing its job is not a problem worth $10,000 to solve.
Worth replacing when…
- The bill is large and grows with headcount rather than with value.
- The workflow that matters most to you is the one the tool handles worst.
- A spreadsheet, a manual export or a person exists purely to patch the gap.
- The feature you need is gated behind a plan that costs several times what you pay now.
- You'd struggle to get your own data out in a usable shape today.
Not sure which side a given tool falls on? That's exactly what the free audit is for — and "keep it" is a common outcome.
The process
Free subscription audit
You send a list of what you pay for — invoices or a screenshot of the billing page is fine. I come back with which line items are worth replacing, which aren't, and a rough cost for the ones that are.
Fixed-price scope
We work through what the software has to do, down to the screens and the rules. You get a written scope, a fixed price and a delivery window before anything is built.
Build
Working software, shown regularly, loaded with your real data as early as possible. You'll be using it before it's finished, which is the only reliable way to find out what's missing.
Handover or hosting
Cut over from the old tool, then either take the keys or leave them with me. Either way you keep the source code and your data.
Two ways to finish
Hosted by me
A flat monthly fee, quoted with the project and never priced per user.
- Hosting, monitoring, backups and restores
- Security patches and dependency updates
- Support when something breaks
- You still hold the source code
- Leave whenever you want — it's your software
Yours outright
Handed over at the end of the build, with everything needed to run it without me.
- Source code in your own repository
- Your data in an open, readable format
- Deployment and operations documentation
- Optional support, billed as you use it
- No licence, no seat count, no renewal
What you get, either way
The source code
In your own repository, under your account, from the first commit — not handed over as a zip file at the end.
Your data, readable
A standard SQL database with a schema you can inspect, plus exports in formats that don't lose the relationships between records.
Documentation
How to run it, deploy it, back it up and restore it — written for a developer who has never seen the project before.
A portable deployment
Containerised, so it runs on my servers, your servers, or a cloud provider of your choosing without a rewrite.
Usual stack: Java and Spring Boot on the back end, Angular on the front, PostgreSQL for data, Docker for deployment. Boring, well-documented technology with a large hiring pool — chosen so you're never stuck with something only I can maintain.
Pricing
One anchor price, a fixed quote before any work, and no hourly surprises on the agreed scope.
$175 upfront (non-refundable) is required to begin any project. It comes off the total.
Work outside the agreed scope is billed at $120/hr, quoted before it starts. Hosting and support, if you want them, are a flat monthly fee — never per seat.
Questions people actually ask
Is custom software really cheaper than a subscription?
Often, but not always. A subscription is a small recurring cost; a build is a large one-off plus a smaller running cost. The build wins when the subscription is large, growing with headcount, or forcing expensive manual workarounds. It loses when the tool is cheap, commodity, and works fine. The free audit exists to work out which one you have.
What happens if you disappear?
You hold the source code and your data in an open format, with deployment documentation, whether or not I host it for you. Any competent developer can pick it up. That is the point of handing over ownership rather than renting you access.
How long does a replacement take to build?
Most projects run 2 to 16 weeks depending on scope. A single well-defined workflow is a few weeks; replacing a system several departments depend on takes longer and is usually staged so you get working software early.
Do I have to move everything at once?
No, and you usually should not. The normal approach is to replace the one workflow that is costing you most, run it alongside the existing tool, and only cancel the subscription once the replacement has proven itself with real data.
What if I want to change it later?
You can. Changes are quoted per piece of work at $120/hr, or you can take the code to another developer. There is no licence that stops you and no per-seat fee that grows as you hire.
Can you work with the software we are keeping?
Yes. Most builds integrate with the tools that are staying — accounting, payments, email — rather than trying to replace the whole stack. Replacing everything is almost always the wrong answer.
Start with the invoices
Send me what you're paying for each month. I'll tell you what's worth replacing and what isn't — free, and with no assumption that the answer is "hire me."
Get a free subscription audit