Service Web applications
The screen is the easy half. We build the half underneath.
Dashboards, portals, storefronts and SaaS products — Next.js and React on top of an API, a database and a deploy pipeline that keep working on the busy Monday, not just the demo Friday.
01 What we build
Six shapes this usually takes.
Operational dashboards
The screen your team keeps open all day: live figures, filters that hold their state, exports that match what's on screen. Fast with a hundred rows and with a hundred thousand.
Customer & partner portals
A logged-in area where clients see their own orders, documents, jobs or usage — with roles, permissions, and an audit trail of who changed what.
E-commerce & checkout
Catalogue, cart and payment through Stripe or your existing processor. Built so a retried payment doesn't charge twice and a failed webhook doesn't lose an order.
SaaS products
Sign-up, teams, subscription billing and per-account data separation — the plumbing every SaaS needs before it can charge anyone, done once and done properly.
Internal tools & admin
The back office that replaces a shared spreadsheet: search, bulk edits, approvals, and enough guardrails that a mistyped value doesn't quietly corrupt the data.
APIs & integrations
A documented API for your own apps and partners, plus the connections to what you already run — accounting, CRM, ERP, shipping — with retries and clear failure reporting.
02 How it works
Anatomy of a web app that holds up.
Almost every app that falls over in month three looks fine in month one. The difference is never the components — it's the boundary between the browser and the data, and whether anyone can see what's happening when it slows down.
Fig. — Browser to API to data, with one rail that gates every deploy and one rail that tells you how it is behaving afterwards.
03 The build
From "we need a proper system for this" to live.
Agree the screens
We list every screen the first version needs and, more usefully, the ones it doesn't. That list is the scope and the quote — anything added later is a conversation, not a surprise invoice.
Model the data
Tables, relationships and permissions before pixels. Most expensive rewrites we're asked to rescue are data-model mistakes that were cheap to fix in week one.
Stand up the spine
Auth, the API, the database and the deploy pipeline go up in the first days, on your accounts. From then on every change is live on a preview URL you can click.
Build in slices
One complete path at a time — screen, API, data, tests — so you're always looking at something that genuinely works rather than a shell that's ninety percent done.
Load, launch, hand over
We test against realistic data volumes, fix what's slow, then hand you the repository, the infrastructure and a short document on how to run it. Two weeks of fixes are included after launch.
04 Fit
This is for you if…
- A spreadsheet is doing a job that clearly needs a real application now.
- Your customers keep emailing to ask for information they should be able to look up.
- An off-the-shelf tool covers most of your process and fights you on the rest.
- You have an existing app that slows down or breaks whenever traffic rises.
- You need proper roles and an audit trail because clients or auditors ask for them.
- You want the code and the hosting in your own name, not locked inside a platform.
05 Questions
What clients ask first.
What does $4,500 actually cover?
A focused first version: roughly six to ten screens, authentication, the data model, the API and a live deployment on your infrastructure. Broad products — many roles, heavy integrations, complex billing — cost more, and we'd rather say so in the first call than discover it in week four. Every project is quoted at a fixed price before we start.
Do we need a designer first?
No. We design as we build, working from a clean, restrained interface style rather than decorating. If you already have a brand or a Figma file we'll follow it exactly; if you want a distinct visual identity beyond a tidy, consistent product, that's worth bringing a designer in for and we'll work alongside them.
Will it hold up under load?
For the traffic most business applications actually see — thousands of daily users, millions of rows — yes, and we test with realistic data volumes before launch rather than after. We'll be straight with you about the honest limit too: a first version sized for a hundred concurrent users is a different build from one sized for fifty thousand, and pretending otherwise just moves the cost later.
Can it connect to the systems we already run?
Usually, and that's the normal case: accounting, CRM, ERP, shipping, payments. The realistic caveat is older systems without a documented API — those can be done, but discovery takes longer and we price that separately once we've seen what we're connecting to.
Who owns and hosts it afterwards?
You do, on your own Vercel, AWS or database accounts from day one — we never hold your production keys hostage. Running costs for a typical first version are tens of dollars a month, not thousands. Any developer can pick the repository up; some clients keep us on a Partner plan for ongoing work, and plenty don't need to.
06 Related
Often built together with:
Describe the screens you wish you had.
A couple of sentences is enough to start. You'll get an honest read on scope — including if we think a smaller build would do — and a fixed quote within 48 hours.
Book a free discovery call