The Situation
A startup needs different things from technology at different moments, and most of the money wasted early goes on building for a stage the business hasn’t reached. Founders spend months and a large share of their funding on a full platform before a single customer has paid. Others go the opposite way, and the no-code prototype that won the first ten customers starts falling over at the fiftieth.
Agencies don’t always help. Many will quote whatever is asked for, because a bigger build is a bigger invoice, and the founder finds out a year later that half of it was never used.
What Good Looks Like
Each stage gets the technology it needs and no more. Before launch, that is a credible website that explains the idea and collects interest. Once there is evidence people want it, it is a minimum viable product that does one job properly for real users. When it starts to grow, it is a platform that can take on more customers and charge them without a rewrite.
The founder knows what each stage costs before committing to it, and nothing built at one stage has to be thrown away at the next.
How We Solve This
We work out which stage you are at before suggesting anything, and we will say so if custom software is premature.
If you are launching, start with a website. Ours is designed for your business through our AI-assisted process, then hosted, secured, updated and supported by the team that built it, for £499 to set up and £59 a month on a 24-month agreement. You can start a website build online, and you get a site that looks like a real company while the product is still being worked out. Where a waiting list or a simple booking form will test demand, we add that rather than building an app nobody has asked for yet. Our WordPress vs custom app comparison explains where that line usually sits.
Once the idea has evidence behind it, we build the MVP: the smallest version that real users can rely on, built on the frameworks we use for production platforms so it can be extended rather than replaced. Writing the requirements down first saves a lot of rework, and our guide to defining requirements for a SaaS product is the process we follow with founders. MVP pricing sets out what that stage usually costs.
When the product is growing, we take it on to a full platform with subscription billing, multi-tenant accounts and the monitoring a paying customer base expects. Launching a SaaS product covers that stage, and our SaaS development page goes into the parts that aren’t the product itself.
What This Typically Involves
- A clear view of which stage you are at and what is worth building now
- A launch website with hosting, updates and support included
- A cheap way to test demand before any custom code is written
- A scoped MVP with a fixed feature list and a timeline you can plan funding around
- Code, database and infrastructure set up so the next stage builds on this one
Who This Is For
Founders and early teams in the UK, funded or self-funded, who need a technical partner rather than a supplier. It suits founders with deep knowledge of the problem they are solving and less of software, and founders who have outgrown a no-code tool and need something that holds up. If your business is past the startup stage and running on spreadsheets rather than building a product, For Small Business is the better fit. Established software businesses will find more on our SaaS companies page.
What We Have Built
Legmark came to us with a young product idea in 2021: benchmark UK law firm websites and tell each firm what to fix first. We built the first version, and it carried the business for over four years while the product grew in directions nobody had planned. In 2026 we built the second generation and moved around 1.6 million records into it with no downtime, so paying subscribers kept their accounts and history. The Legmark case study covers how.
That is the path we aim for with any startup. The first version has to be small enough to launch and sound enough to last until the business knows where it is going. We also build and run our own platform, which runs our client work and billing every day, so the advice on what a product needs comes from running one ourselves.
Start at the Right Stage
If you need a website for launch, the £499 website is the quickest place to start. If you have a product idea and want to know what it would take, tell us what you need in the form below. We will come back with the stage we think you are at and a rough cost for the first piece of work. The solutions overview covers the other problems we work on.
