01 · Build

Software that fits the way you actually work.

Every growing business hits the same wall: the CRM does not do routing, the routing tool does not do estimates, and the gap between them is a whiteboard plus the one person who knows where everything is. We build the piece that closes the gap, on boring, durable technology you could hand to any other developer later.

See pricing

You own it

source code in your GitHub organization from commit one

Fixed price

scoped and phased, with no hourly meter running

30 days

to the first working slice in production

What is in it

  • Business web applications

  • Customer portals

  • Admin dashboards

  • Internal tools

  • Mobile applications

  • SaaS applications

  • Enterprise applications

  • Legacy application modernization

  • API development

  • Third-party API integrations

  • Microservices

  • Workflow automation

A customer portal for a pest control company

Built in five weeks. Replaced about forty “when is my next service?” calls a week with a page.

  1. 1

    Job history and next service date

  2. 2

    Invoices, receipts and card on file

  3. 3

    One-tap reschedule inside the route

  4. 4

    Warranty documents and treatment records

How every project starts

Discovery week

Five days inside your business before we write a line of code or put a number on a proposal. We shadow the actual work, not the org chart, because what owners say is broken and what is actually broken rarely match.

  1. Day 1

    The map

    Read-only access to every system, and a list of who logs into what. By the end of the day the current process is drawn on one page, including the parts that live in someone’s head.

  2. Day 2

    Shadow the work

    A morning beside the person who really runs it. We watch the spreadsheet, the phone, the retyping, and count the hand-offs where a job goes quiet.

  3. Day 3

    The paper trail

    The last twenty quotes and invoices, a day of real calls and emails, the support inbox. The paperwork shows what happens; the interviews show what people think happens.

  4. Day 4

    Try the shelf first

    An afternoon configuring the off-the-shelf tool that gets closest. If it does 80% of the job, that goes in the plan instead of a build, even though the build is the bigger invoice.

  5. Day 5

    The one-page plan

    What to do first, what can wait, a fixed price per phase and a date for the first working slice. We read it together in thirty minutes.

What we look at

  • Every system you run, and who has the login

  • The spreadsheet everyone actually works from

  • Your last twenty quotes and your last twenty invoices

  • A day of real calls, emails and texts

  • Every hand-off where somebody retypes something

  • What an existing tool could do instead of a build

What you get

A one-page plan with a number on it

  • The sequence: what we build first, and why that piece

  • A fixed price per phase, with a place to stop between phases

  • The date the first working slice goes live

  • What we would configure instead of build

  • What you own at the end of it, and where it lives

The plan is yours to keep, whether we build it or someone else does.

Small, well-defined jobs do not need a week. A single API, a data migration or a one-screen internal tool gets the first call and a written quote, and we skip the shadowing.

Almost every plan changes after this week.

Pricing

From $12,000

Fixed price per phase. Discovery first, then a written spec with a number on it.

Hosting, maintenance and minor changes run under a managed plan from $299/mo.

Questions

Yes. It is the most expensive thing we sell and the easiest to get wrong. If Jobber, Airtable, HubSpot or a Shopify app does 80% of the job, we say so on the first call, even though the custom build is the bigger invoice.

Platforms we use here

AWS

Postgres

GitHub

Cloudflare

Stripe

Jobber

Docker / Kubernetes

Book the 30 minutes. Worst case, you leave with a plan you can hand to someone else.

No deck. No pitch. You talk about what your week actually looks like and we write down what we would fix first.

pst@balsamsolutions.com

The answering desk never closes. Nights, weekends, holidays, storm weeks.

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