Almost no custom web app development starts with a specification. It starts with a spreadsheet that somebody built to track one thing, which grew a second column, then a tab, then a formula only one person understands. Three years later that file holds the schedule, the pricing and half the customer records, four...
Bespoke Software
Articles, guides and tutorials on commissioning and delivering bespoke software, covering requirements, contracts and quality assurance for custom projects.
A search for bespoke software development London returns several hundred firms charging between £400 and £1,800 a day for what looks, from the outside, like the same work. Almost none publish a price. The spread is real and it is explicable, but nothing on those websites explains it, and a buyer holding three proposals...
Software escrow exists to answer a reasonable fear: the supplier who built and runs your critical system goes out of business, and you are left with something you depend on and cannot maintain. An escrow agreement puts the source code with a third party who releases it to you if that happens. The fear is legitimate....
The choice between a fixed price contract and time and materials is usually framed as a choice about risk, which is correct, and then immediately mishandled, because both sides assume the risk goes away rather than moving. It does not go away. In a fixed price arrangement the supplier carries the risk of the estimate...
A software RFP is supposed to make suppliers comparable. Most achieve the opposite, because they specify a solution in enough detail to constrain the answer while leaving out the information anybody would need to price it. The result is five quotes spanning an order of magnitude, all technically responsive, none of...
Software maintenance cost is the number that turns a successful project into a difficult conversation eighteen months later. The build was budgeted, approved and delivered. What happens after it goes live was described as “support” and given a figure somebody guessed at, and that figure was almost always too small. The...
MVP software development goes wrong at the scoping meeting, not during the build. Somebody says “minimum viable product”, everybody nods, and then the feature list arrives containing user accounts, an admin panel, billing, notifications, a dashboard and a mobile app. That is not a minimum viable product. That is a...
Anyone estimating custom API development cost from the number of endpoints is going to be wrong, usually by a factor of three. Endpoints are the cheapest part. A dozen of them, reading and writing data you already hold, is a fortnight’s work for a competent backend developer. What costs money is everything that turns...
Search interest in “WordPress vs custom website” has grown consistently year on year and in 2026 it remains one of the most common questions UK business owners ask when commissioning a new site. That is partly because WordPress now powers 43% of all websites on the internet, so it is genuinely hard to avoid the...
Outsourcing software development has grown significantly as a search topic in the UK, with “outsourcing software development” up 70% and “software development outsourcing” up 60% over the past three months. UK businesses are actively looking for external development capacity, but many are uncertain whether to engage a...