When standard tools stop fitting your workflows
Most business software is designed for the median use case. For the first few years of a business's life, this is usually adequate — you adapt your workflows to the tools available, accept the limitations, and move on. At some point, the accumulated cost of those adaptations becomes visible: workarounds for workflows that don't fit, data that lives in spreadsheets because no system captures it properly, manual processes that exist because the integrations aren't available, and operational visibility gaps that the installed tooling simply cannot address.
This is the point at which the question of a custom internal platform becomes worth asking seriously. Not because the off-the-shelf tools are bad, but because your actual operational requirements have grown specific enough that a platform designed for your workflows is now more cost-effective than continuing to adapt around the limitations of general-purpose tools.
What we build and what we don't
We build internal operational platforms — tools that your team uses to do their work, not customer-facing products. This distinction matters for scope, architecture, and operational requirements.
The platforms we design and deploy most often fall into several categories: operational dashboards and reporting systems that consolidate data from multiple sources; internal workflow automation platforms that replace manual handoffs and approval chains; developer portals and internal tooling that standardise how engineering teams access infrastructure and services; data integration platforms that connect systems which don't speak to each other natively; and customer-facing operational tools like support portals, onboarding flows, and account management interfaces that benefit from custom logic.
We build on open-source foundations wherever appropriate. This means the underlying platform is not locked to us as a vendor — you own the codebase, and the operational model is designed for handover if you choose to build internal capacity.
Architecture and development process
Internal platform development begins with a requirements phase that is different in emphasis from standard software development: we focus on the operational workflows being replaced or enabled, the failure modes of the current approach, the integration requirements with existing systems, and the governance requirements around access and audit.
From this requirements phase, we produce an architecture document before any code is written. The architecture covers the technology choices, integration approach, data model, access control design, hosting and deployment model, and operational requirements. This document is reviewed and agreed before development begins.
Development follows an iterative process with working software delivered in stages, not a single large handover at the end of a long project. This allows requirements to be refined based on actual usage rather than assumptions about how a system will be used before it exists.
Operations after delivery
A custom internal platform is infrastructure. It requires the same ongoing operational care as any other system we deploy: monitoring, version updates, security patches, backup management, and documentation maintenance. We provide these as part of the ongoing operations engagement, with the same operational model as our other managed systems.
For businesses that want to build internal capacity to operate and extend their platform, we support a structured transition: knowledge transfer sessions, documentation review, shadowing periods, and a defined point at which your team assumes primary operational responsibility. The transition is planned, not forced — it happens when your team is ready, not when a contract expires.