service / 01 custom software

Bespoke software,
built around your business.

Custom software is what we build when a business has outgrown spreadsheets and off-the-shelf SaaS no longer fits. We design the data model first, write tests before features, and integrate the parts that actually matter for a Kenyan operator — M-Pesa Daraja STK and C2B, KRA eTIMS callbacks, SMS gateways, Supervisor-backed queue workers — without the consultancy overhead.

— ch. 01 / what you get

What you get

A schema before a screen

Two weeks of discovery before any UI work. We sit with the people doing the work today, map the awkward edge cases, and draft a Laravel or PostgreSQL schema that survives the next three years of feature requests.

A working build inside three weeks

The first deployable build lands in week three on a staging URL you can show stakeholders. It is not polished — it is real. You see progress as commits, not slide decks.

M-Pesa done properly

Daraja STK Push with timeout reconciliation, C2B for paybill workflows, B2C for disbursements, and callback handlers that survive Safaricom's occasional 500s. We've shipped this stack to production seven times.

Queues, jobs, and Supervisor

Anything slow or flaky runs through Laravel Horizon on Redis, supervised by Supervisor at the OS level. Retries are bounded. Failures are logged. Nothing silently drops on the floor.

Full source on day one

Code lives in your GitHub from the first commit. We invite you to PRs, not screenshots. When the engagement ends, you have the entire history — no zip files, no licensing, no lock-in.

— ch. 02 / our approach

Our approach

We work in two-week iterations on a single Laravel monolith — not because monoliths are fashionable again, but because they are honest. One repo, one deploy target, one place to find a bug at 2am. Microservices come later, when the team is large enough to justify the operational tax.

Every engagement starts with a paid discovery week. We map the workflows, write the data model, and draft a sprint plan. If at the end of that week you decide we are not the right shop, you keep the artefacts. We've seen too many agencies use discovery as a sales funnel — we'd rather get paid for the thinking.

After discovery, sprints run on GitHub Projects with weekly demo calls. You see the build on a staging URL every Friday. We don't hide work-in-progress.

— ch. 03 / pricing & timeline

Pricing & timeline

discovery · 1 week · KES 25,000 · fixed
mvp · 4–6 weeks · KES 250,000+ · per-sprint billing
v1 production · 8–14 weeks · KES 600,000+ · per-sprint billing
retainer · ongoing · from KES 80,000/month · 4–8 dev hours/week

All prices exclude VAT. 50% upfront on each sprint, balance on completion. No fixed-price engagements without a paid discovery — we won't quote what we haven't scoped.

— ch. 04 / recent example

Recent example

HyipX investment platforma Laravel-based platform with M-Pesa STK Push deposits, scheduled-job withdrawals, referral hierarchies, and a custom admin dashboard. Shipped in 6 weeks from first commit to production traffic.

99.94% M-Pesa callback reliability over 12 months
Sub-200ms p95 response on the admin dashboard
Zero unplanned downtime since launch

Ready to scope a custom build?

One 30-minute call. We listen, ask the awkward questions, and tell you what discovery would cost.