Contract Work

Working software on your own hosting, usually in about a week — and the custom code is yours.

Most of our contract work is not a new application from nothing. It is a system that already exists and needs to do something it does not do yet — connect to a service, survive a platform change, stop losing data, or finally give somebody a screen to manage it from. That is the work we are best at, and it is usually the work that pays back fastest.

We write PHP, in whatever framework you already use, and we deploy to whatever you already run. Shared hosting, cPanel, a VPS, your existing server. There is no platform to migrate to, and no part of the result stops working because we are no longer involved.

Integrations

Connecting an existing application to something else and making the join reliable: payment processors, shipping carriers, CRMs, accounting systems, booking and calendar services, mail and SMS providers, and internal APIs that were documented once and never since.

Legacy maintenance & modernisation

Older PHP applications that still earn their keep. Upgrading them to a supported version, replacing an integration that was retired underneath them, untangling code nobody has touched in years, and doing it without a rewrite nobody asked for.

Diagnosis & repair

Something broke and the cause is not obvious. Login failures, database errors, mail that silently stops arriving, a site that works for some visitors and not others. We find out what it actually is before changing anything, and we tell you what it was.

Internal tools & admin dashboards

The screen your team needs in order to stop working out of a spreadsheet. Records, search, filters, roles and permissions, exports, and reporting that answers the question somebody actually asks every week.

Client & member portals

A place for the people outside your company to log in and do something useful — see their documents, check a status, submit a request, pay an invoice. Authentication, roles and access control done properly rather than bolted on.

Booking & scheduling

Availability, appointments, resources, reminders and the awkward parts — timezones, cancellations, double-booking, and the rules that are obvious to you and invisible in every off-the-shelf product.

Data-driven applications

Applications whose value is the data in them: catalogues, directories, listings, inventories, case and ticket tracking, and the searching, filtering and reporting that makes any of it usable.

Migration & data work

Moving a system to new hosting, merging two datasets that disagree, cleaning up records that accumulated their own history, or getting data out of a product you are leaving and into one you are not.

Subcontract & white-label

We work behind agencies and studios who have taken on a PHP project and need it delivered. Your client relationship stays yours, we stay invisible if you prefer, and you get a clean handover you can support.

How we work

Fixed scope, stated plainly

You get a price and a number of days, and a written note of what is not included. If the job turns out to be a different job, we say so before starting rather than after.

Your hosting, and what you own

The result is an ordinary PHP application that runs where you already run things. The custom code written for your project is yours. It sits on our PHP framework, which is MIT-licensed open source — free to use and modify, with or without us. Where a build uses one of our premium modules, you get a perpetual licence to it as part of the project: bought once, yours to keep, with no ongoing fee and nothing that expires. Nothing is locked to a platform of ours, and nothing stops working because we stopped being involved.

Your framework, if you have one

Our own tooling is how we work quickly when a project starts from nothing. It is not a condition. If you are on Laravel, Symfony, CodeIgniter, WordPress or plain PHP that somebody wrote in 2011, we will work in that — which is usually the case anyway, because most of what we are asked to do is change something that already exists. No migration, no second framework alongside the first, and nothing of ours to licence.

Data up front

For anything with a schedule attached, we need the schema, sample data or credentials at the start. It is the single biggest cause of a one-week job becoming a three-week one, and it is easy to avoid.

What we will tell you not to do

Some of what arrives described as a software problem is not one, and some systems are not worth extending. We would rather say that in the first conversation than bill for finding out slowly. If the honest answer is that an off-the-shelf product already does this, or that the rewrite you are considering will cost more than the problem it solves, that is the answer you will get.

Tell us what you are trying to do — the system it involves, the deadline if there is one, and what happens if it does not get done. That is usually enough for a straight answer on whether we are the right people and what it would cost.