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Senior web & app development · 20 capabilities
oakstone.digital
Apps & software / capability

SaaS & custom software
no vendor sells you.

Product engineering for the system your business runs on and no vendor sells off the shelf.

This is for you if
  • Your operation runs on spreadsheets that only one person understands
  • You are paying for four tools and still exporting between them
  • An internal tool has become business-critical and nobody owns it
A sharper way forward

The work should
change the numbers.

Tools we reach for
TypeScriptNext.jsNode.jsPostgreSQLDrizzleRedisVercelAWS

Custom software is worth building when the process is your advantage. If the way you quote, schedule, verify or route work is genuinely better than your competitors, forcing it into a generic tool quietly gives that advantage away.

We build products in vertical slices: one complete workflow working end to end, in production, used by real people, before the second one starts. It is slower to demo and far faster to reach something valuable.

The platform concerns arrive early, because retrofitting them is what makes SaaS products expensive: tenancy, permissions, audit trails, billing, background jobs and observability.

What's included

What the engagement
actually contains.

01

Domain and data modelling

The nouns and verbs of your business settled properly, because the schema outlives every screen above it.

02

Multi-tenant architecture

Isolation, roles, permissions and audit logging designed in from the first migration.

03

Vertical-slice delivery

Complete workflows shipped one at a time, each usable in production before the next begins.

04

Billing and plans

Subscriptions, usage metering, seats, trials and invoicing wired to a real provider rather than faked.

05

Background processing

Queues, scheduled jobs, retries and idempotency for the work that must not be lost.

06

Observability

Structured logs, traces, metrics and alerts so production problems are diagnosed rather than guessed at.

What you get
  • Production application and infrastructure as code
  • Documented data model and API
  • Role and permission matrix
  • Billing and subscription implementation
  • Automated test and deployment pipeline
  • Runbooks and architecture decision records
Signals it is time
  • Your operation runs on spreadsheets that only one person understands
  • You are paying for four tools and still exporting between them
  • An internal tool has become business-critical and nobody owns it
  • You want to sell the system you built for yourself
Common mistakes we fix

What usually went wrong
before we were called.

  • 01Building six half-finished workflows instead of one complete one
  • 02Retrofitting tenancy, permissions and audit logging after the first customer
  • 03Faking billing in the demo and discovering the real rules at launch
  • 04No structured logging, so production issues are diagnosed by guesswork
How we measure it
  • Time to first value for a new account
  • Workflow completion rate
  • Deployment frequency and change failure rate
  • Support load per active account
Typical timeline

3–6 months, with the first workflow live inside 6 weeks

Practicalities

What week one
actually looks like.

First week

Domain modelling with the people who do the work today, plus a slice plan that names which single workflow ships first and what it would take to stop after it.

What we need from you
  • Access to current systems and spreadsheets
  • Two or three domain experts for interviews
  • Cloud accounts in your name
  • A product owner for weekly prioritisation
Not included
  • Sales and go-to-market activity
  • Customer support operations
  • Cloud infrastructure costs
  • Data entry or migration of unstructured records

Scope boundaries stated up front rather than discovered in a change request.

How the work runs

Four stages, visible throughout.

01

Model

The domain, data and permissions written down before any interface exists, because the schema outlives every screen above it.

02

Prototype

Flows and states tested as a clickable prototype, so the expensive disagreements happen in Figma rather than in code.

03

Ship in slices

One workflow at a time, in production, with tests and observability included in the definition of done.

04

Operate

Release tooling, monitoring and a documented handover so your team can run and extend what we built.

Questions buyers actually ask

SaaS & custom software, answered.

By finding the single workflow that carries the most value and shipping that first, properly. A two-week discovery gives you a data model, a slice plan and a cost range per slice — so you can stop or redirect at any point with something usable already live.

Yes, entirely. Code lives in your repositories, infrastructure sits in your accounts, and third-party services are registered to you. There is no lock-in mechanism in how we work; if you want to move the work in-house, we help you do it.

Frequently. We embed in your repository, follow your review standards and pair where knowledge transfer matters. Plenty of engagements are deliberately structured so your team ends up owning the product entirely.

We build them when they solve the stated problem better than deterministic logic, and we say so plainly when they do not. Retrieval over your own documents and classification of inbound work are the two that most reliably earn their keep.

A better brief starts here

Make saas & custom software useful.

Bring us the hard thing. We will bring a point of view, a senior team and a clear next step.

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