"Custom software" sounds like something only corporations commission. In reality, the most satisfying projects on my workbench are for ordinary businesses (and more and more, for individuals) who were fighting a spreadsheet, paying monthly for a bloated app they used 10% of, or doing something by hand that a machine should have been doing for years.
Here are the kinds of systems I've actually built, and what each one replaced.
CRMs that match how you actually sell
Off-the-shelf CRMs are built for software salespeople with pipelines and quotas. A trades business, a lettings agent or a workshop has a completely different rhythm: enquiries, jobs, callbacks, repeat customers. A custom CRM stores your fields, follows your workflow, and costs nothing per user per month forever. No forced upgrades. No exporting your own customer list from someone else's cloud.
EPOS and point-of-sale tools
Point-of-sale is where generic software hurts most, because every till interaction repeats hundreds of times a day. A custom EPOS layer can be shaped around your products and your VAT setup. It can also talk directly to your stock and your accounts package, so the numbers reconcile themselves instead of being retyped every Friday night.
News readers and information dashboards
This one gets less attention: tools that gather information for you. A custom news reader pulls the sources you care about into one clean feed and flags the stories that matter to your industry. The same pattern powers business dashboards — sales, jobs, website enquiries and cashflow on one screen instead of six logins.
Small automations
What all of these have in common
- They started as a sentence, not a specification. "I'm sick of typing the same thing into two systems" is a perfectly good project brief.
- They were quoted fixed-price after a free discovery chat. No day rates, no meter running.
- The customer owns the code. Source, documentation and deployment details are handed over at the end, so there's no lock-in.
If there's a job in your week that feels like the computer should be doing it, it probably should. Here's how the process works, and the first conversation costs nothing.
