Custom software, built for how your business actually works
When the spreadsheet stops coping and no off-the-shelf product fits, we build the thing itself: estimating, job costing, scheduling, client portals, dashboards, the lot. Builds start at $1,900, and how much of it you own is a decision you make, not one we make for you.
The question most developers skip: who owns it?
Most quotes hide this. We put it first, because it changes the price more than the feature list does.
- Access. You use the platform. We keep ownership and may reuse the work with other clients. Cheapest by a wide margin — deliberately about half the middle option. From $1,900.
- Ownership of your modules, plus a perpetual platform licence. The parts specific to your business are yours, permanently, on top of our platform. This is what we recommend to most businesses. From $3,800.
- Full custom, 100% of the IP assigned to you. You own all of it and can do anything with it, including sell it. From $14,400.
Those are starting figures against an agreed scope, not a menu. We will not quote a fixed price before we understand the work — but once it is fixed, it is fixed. If you intend to resell what we build, say so early; it changes the licensing.
Running costs, stated up front
- Hosting from $99 CAD per month, depending on tier. Canadian servers, or your own infrastructure if you prefer.
- Optional maintenance retainer from $175 per month. Industry standard for software maintenance is 15–25% of build cost per year; we quote against that benchmark rather than inventing a number.
- Changes and new work at $125 per hour, quoted in advance.
- Nothing recurring starts until launch. Development and staging hosting during the build is free.
Typical timelines are 6–8 weeks for the access and ownership tiers, and 16–20 weeks for a full custom build.
What tends to get built
- Estimating and quoting, with your own markup and margin logic
- Labour and material costing, and job-costing dashboards that tell you if you made money
- Client and tenant portals
- Scheduling, dispatch and route planning
- Document generation — quotes, invoices, statements, compliance records
- AI where it earns its place: drafting, summarising, classifying, answering
- Phone and messaging built into the product, not bolted beside it
- Integrations with the accounting, payment and CRM systems you already run
Two examples
A construction and trades platform
An Ontario firm came to us wanting to turn a set of hard-won Excel workbooks — real estimating and costing logic, refined over years — into a web product for small construction and skilled-trade businesses: customer and project management, estimating, labour and material costing, markup and profit, quote PDFs, and a job-costing dashboard.
The workbooks were the specification, not a rough guide. We quoted all three ownership models rather than picking one for them, because the right answer depended on whether they intended to sell the product to other firms or just use it. Phase one landed in the $1,900–$5,800 band depending on that choice, with the full build quoted separately and a free review of the workbooks before any fixed price was committed.
Details anonymised: this engagement has not been publicly announced.
TriageLogic — twenty years on a clinical platform
Joel spent roughly two decades as Director of IT building and running the nurse-triage platform at TriageLogic: healthcare integration and interoperability, infrastructure and availability, and an AI governance practice that existed well before anyone called it a product category. It is the clearest evidence we can point to that a full custom build, owned outright by the client and maintained for the long term, is something we have actually done rather than something we are willing to attempt.
The write-up is deliberately precise about what is and is not being claimed — including that TriageLogic's SOC 2 Type II attestation belongs to TriageLogic, not to us. Read the full case study.
Long-term support, and handing it to your team
Software that nobody can maintain is a liability with a nice interface. We plan for the handover from the start: documentation written for the person who comes after us, training for whoever on your staff will own it, and a maintenance arrangement sized to the build rather than to what we think you will tolerate.
If you want your own developer to take it over, we will help them take it over. At TriageLogic the platform was handed over at the end of the contract at no charge, which is the posture we bring to this generally.
Start
Bring the spreadsheet, the process, or just the problem. If what you need is really a website, we will point you at the $99 build instead of selling you software.