The Logbook
Field notes from the studio.
Case studies, build logs, and honest analysis of where software services are going — written by the person doing the building.
How much does it cost to build a mobile app in 2026?
The real price bands, the five things that actually move the number, and why the same brief gets quoted at $8,000 by one shop and $250,000 by another.
Read the breakdown →What agentic development changes about cost and timelines — and what it doesn't
Agents collapsed the cost of producing code. They left the cost of deciding what to build exactly where it was. Which of your costs sit on which side.
Read the economics →Fixed price vs hourly: which actually protects the client?
Hourly moves estimate risk onto you and quietly pays for slowness. Fixed price inverts it — when structured properly. Including when hourly is genuinely right.
Read the comparison →How long does it take to build an MVP?
Three to six weeks, if the decisions get made. A week-by-week breakdown of where the time goes — and why the delays are almost never the code.
Read the breakdown →What to ask a software studio before you hire them
Twelve questions that separate studios who will ship from ones who will bill, with what a good answer sounds like and what each evasion tells you.
Read the questions →What “you own the code” actually means in a software contract
Owning the source is the easy half. The accounts, credentials, licences and rights that decide whether you can actually leave a vendor.
Read the checklist →AI agent vs chatbot: what's the actual difference?
One answers questions, the other changes things. How to tell which your problem needs, the failure modes of each, and what they cost to build.
Read the explainer →RAG vs fine-tuning: which does your business actually need?
RAG teaches a model what you know; fine-tuning teaches it how to behave. Most businesses asking for one need the other — or better retrieval.
Read the guide →Should you build a companion app for your hardware product?
An app either makes your hardware meaningfully better or becomes a permanent liability. The four questions that decide which.
Read the guide →How to connect legacy hardware to a modern app
RS-232 devices outlive the software that spoke to them. The four bridge architectures, and how to reverse a protocol nobody documented.
Read the guide →Agentic AI workflows in production: how software actually gets built with agents
The exact five-stage pipeline we run — groom, plan, build with parallel agents, verify, ship — diagrammed, with the patterns that survive production and the human checkpoints that make it safe.
Read the method →What the giant consultancies sell — and what most businesses actually need
We read the public service catalogs of the industry's largest firms so you don't have to. Underneath the language, most line items are software deliverables an AI-native studio now ships in weeks.
Read the analysis →Live telemetry for a racing ECU: a build log
How we connected a decades-old serial protocol to a native iOS app and a web dashboard — half-second refresh, pit-lane-ready — for PRS Motorsport Equipment of Monza, Italy.
Read the build log →