Built for your actual process
Custom Software Engineering
Software shaped around how your business really works, rather than a package you spend two years bending yourself around.
- Reduction in manual admin
- 62%
- Typical across workflow-automation builds in the first year.
- Deployment frequency
- 40×
- Improvement after moving clients from quarterly releases to trunk-based CI/CD.
- Defect escape rate
- 0,4%
- Share of releases requiring a hotfix across our delivery portfolio.
Our position
How we think about it
Off-the-shelf software is the right answer more often than vendors admit. We will tell you when it is. When it is not — when the process is the competitive advantage, when the integration surface is unusual, when the licence cost has outgrown the build cost — we design and build the system properly: typed end to end, tested, documented, and handed over with the source and the knowledge to run it.
What you receive
- Discovery report with domain model and prioritised backlog
- Architecture decision records for every significant choice
- Working software delivered every two weeks
- Automated test suite with coverage gates in CI
- Infrastructure as code and a reproducible environment
- Operations and onboarding documentation
- Full source ownership — no vendor lock-in, no licence trap
Capabilities
What we actually build
- Greenfield product and platform engineering
- Legacy modernisation and strangler-fig migrations
- Systems integration across ERP, SCADA, HR and finance
- Workflow, approval and case-management systems
- Reporting and business-intelligence layers
- Offline-first field applications
- API design, versioning and developer portals
- Technical due diligence and architecture review
Technologies we use
- TypeScript
- Next.js
- NestJS
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
- Prisma
- Redis
- GraphQL
- Go
- Python
- Docker
- Kubernetes
Process
How a custom software engineering engagement runs
Each phase ends with something you can look at and a decision you can make.
- 012–3 weeks
Discovery
We sit with the people who do the work, map the real process — including the spreadsheet everyone pretends is not load-bearing — and write it down.
- 021–2 weeks
Architecture
Domain model, service boundaries, data design, integration contracts and non-functional requirements, each recorded as an ADR.
- 038–20 weeks
Build in slices
Vertical slices that reach production behind a feature flag. You use real software from week four, not a slide deck.
- 042–3 weeks
Harden
Load testing, penetration testing, accessibility audit, disaster-recovery rehearsal and a documented runbook.
- 052 weeks
Hand over
Source, infrastructure, documentation and paired sessions with your team. You can run it without us — that is the point.
Questions
Custom Software Engineering — common questions
If yours is not here, ask Nova or send it to us directly.
Who owns the code?
You do, in full, from the first commit. We work in your repository or transfer ours at completion. There are no runtime licences, no per-seat fees and no encrypted binaries.Will you work alongside our internal developers?
Regularly, and it is usually the best outcome. We pair, review each other's pull requests and hand over incrementally rather than in one traumatic event at the end.How do you price?
Discovery is fixed price. Delivery is a fixed-capacity monthly team, or fixed price per milestone where scope is genuinely stable. We do not do open-ended time and materials.What if we need to stop halfway?
You keep everything built to that point, running and documented. Because we ship vertical slices to production continuously, there is no half-finished state that is worthless.