Custom software means building exactly what your business needs, rather than adapting to what an off-the-shelf product can offer. Whether that's a mobile app, a web-based platform, or a system that connects everything together, we design and build bespoke solutions that replace manual processes and create transformational growth.
You may be here looking for:
- iOS and/or Android applications for your mobile workforce
- A job management system to help track work from quote to completion
- A finance system to manage incoming and outgoing payments and reconciliation
- Integrations that make one piece of software talk to another
- An HR platform to manage staff onboarding, training, and retention
- A live data dashboard to give you an overview of your company
Or you might need help with:
- E-commerce, whether it’s what the customer sees or how you manage it
- Distribution, digital or physical
- Logistics, such as inventory management
- Scheduling, making sure all jobs are done in the right order
…or perhaps something else entirely.
The good news is that you're in the right place. You can come to us with any problem and we will find a solution. Everything we build is designed to replace manual processes with intelligent systems that create transformational growth.
Our process is at the core of what we do
We work using Agile Scrum methodology, which means we plan our work as small, bitesize tasks. We allocate these tasks to a two-week period of work. Every fortnight, we meet you to show progress, get your feedback, and prioritise the next tasks.
It’s a very common method of software development. We, and our clients, see how its iterative and incremental nature is beneficial, flexible, and gives a quick return on investment.
Our team are all in-house
When you work with Switchplane, you’re not buying a ready-made product. You’re working with a team of highly-skilled developers, all directly employed by us. No outsourcing, no dealing with call centres on the other side of the world, and we're not an agency.
We work from our office based at FOUNDRY in Eastbourne, on the south coast of the UK. We're a close-knit team working together day in, day out, and every day begins with a team catch-up.
This means we have tight control of our project management. Our staff stay with you and know your projects. You'll have a dedicated tech lead and familiar faces throughout our partnership.
Heads-up, this section uses technical jargon. You don't need to read it - we're just summarising our technical setup for those people that want to know. In summary, we follow best practices in what we do.
We run a custom-built Docker environment using PHP with Apache. We make heavy use of Amazon Web Services (AWS), including S3, ECS, RDS, Lambda, SQS, SNS, EC2, CloudFront, etc.
Our web stack is PHP, TypeScript, MySQL, with a little React.
We build our apps using Flutter in Dart, meaning it's easy to deploy to both iOS and Android devices.
But we’ll use whichever tools are best for the job.
The engine behind all our work is Switchplane-built. This engine has grown extensively since its inception back in 2003. It's similar to Symfony and Laravel, but they didn’t exist when we started out, so we built our own.
We use Git (on GitHub). We keep our develop branches in an always-releasable state so we can respond to urgent changes if needed.
Our developers work on our code within a dev environment that's kept separate from staging and production. We then release the project to a staging environment for further functional testing. Our clients can test and review at this stage too. Finally, once everyone's happy, we deploy to the production environment.
Our web applications are load-balanced on containerised infrastructure running on AWS ECS. We use AWS RDS for storing application data, which provides a fast and resilient service.
Our cloud environments are managed using Terraform and Terragrunt for reusable infrastructure across regions.
All our development is test driven. We have extensive code review processes to make sure the quality of our code is top-notch.
We use a wide range of tooling to ensure our projects are in a healthy state. If a system’s performance is impacted in any way, we are alerted so we can take action.
That’s more than enough tech information for now, but we’re happy to have a more in-depth chat when the need arises.
Take a look at some of our work
Job management systems to HR platforms, apps to help save lives and beyond. Our case studies show the possibilities of custom software across a range of industries.
