Custom software development in Austin
Inside a growing Austin company, internal tools lose every prioritisation meeting. Sales operations quotes from a spreadsheet, customer onboarding is a checklist in a shared document, and finance reconciles by hand every month. Engineers are reserved for the product, and when the hiring freeze arrives, the internal tools list does not move at all.
That list suits an engagement well: defined pieces of work, each with a clear owner, none of which needs a permanent hire. We sit with the people who use the spreadsheet, collect the exceptions they handle from memory, and build a tool that connects to the CRM, the billing system and the data you already have. Old data comes across with counts and totals checked against the source. The tool is documented and built to be changed by your own engineers later, because an internal tool only its builder understands has just moved the spreadsheet problem somewhere else.
The city's centre of gravity is enterprise SaaS and consumer fintech, and both bring the same backend problem early: multi-tenancy that was bolted on after the first enterprise deal, and a permissions model that started as a role column. Then the large customer asks for custom roles and SSO, the board asks for usage-based pricing, and the schema was built for neither. Unpicking that while the product keeps selling is most of what an Austin engagement looks like in the first month. On the fintech side the same pressure lands on the mobile app and the ledger: transfers that must never send twice, and balances that have to match what finance sees.
Austin has also been a hardware and semiconductor town for decades. The fabs and equipment suppliers produce tool telemetry, inspection images and test results in volumes most software companies never see, and the hardware start-ups around them reach the point where a board works on the bench and a pilot customer wants to see its data. Their engineers are process, yield and firmware specialists. The software around the hardware, from the device API and the dashboard to the pipeline that turns readings into something a customer can open, is a defined piece of work that suits an outside team.
Then there is timing. Austin has an unusual density of Series A and B product companies, and they tend to raise, hire aggressively for two quarters, then freeze. A mid-level engineer costs around $145,000 base before equity and benefits, and the platform or infrastructure hire is usually the one that waits longest. We are frequently the answer to "we have the roadmap and the budget, but the req is frozen until next quarter", because an engagement is an invoice rather than a headcount. It starts with a fixed-price two-week piece, and it can grow into an embedded engineer for as long as the roadmap needs one.
We move our working day for Texas. Four hours of every working day overlap with your morning in Central time, so stand-up, code review and the design conversation happen live with the engineer who writes the code. The code lives in your repositories from the first commit, and runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go, so whoever you hire next inherits work they can read.
We are the right fit when the roadmap is ready and the req is frozen. A defined piece of work, such as a permissions model, a device backend or a cloud setup brought under control, starts with a fixed-price two-week piece. Senior capacity arrives within days, and agencies can put the work under their own name.
Four ways this arrives.
Approvals, schedules or stock, tracked in a shared file with colour codes only one person understands. We turn it into an application with proper records, permissions and history, so you can see who changed what and when, and nobody works from an old copy.
Staff copy data from one system into another by hand, and the two slowly drift apart. We connect them through their APIs, clean up the data where it crosses over, and alert someone when a sync fails instead of letting it fail quietly.
The numbers exist, spread across exports and inboxes, and someone assembles a report by hand every Monday. We pull them into one place, build the dashboard the people making decisions will actually open, and check it is current rather than trusting the job that feeds it.
A legacy application still runs the business and every change to it is a risk. We map what it really does, move it piece by piece onto something maintainable, and keep both running until the last piece has landed. No weekend cut-over.
A facilities operations platform for a healthcare estate, built so supervisors can see what is overdue and what keeps coming back without exporting spreadsheets by hand.
Read the write-up →Asked by Austin teams.
How do you work with teams in Austin?+
We are in Bengaluru and move our working day for Texas, so four hours of every working day overlap with your morning in Central time. Stand-ups, code reviews and design calls happen live in that window. We work in your tools, whether that is Slack, GitHub or Linear, and the person on every call is the engineer who writes the code.
Why do Austin product companies come to you?+
Austin has an unusual density of Series A and B product companies with a strong front-end team and no infrastructure hire yet. That is precisely the seat we fill: the multi-tenant backend, the permissions model, the cloud setup and the deploys that nobody senior owns. It is why more of our US enquiries come from Texas than from the coasts. We build it in your codebase, alongside the team you already have.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Austin?+
A mid-level software engineer in Austin earns around $145,000 base before equity and benefits. Our published rate is $35/hour, or $5,400 a month for an embedded engineer, with a $5,000 minimum. There is no recruiting time and no employment overhead, and work starts within days of the call. The first piece is a fixed-price two-week engagement at $2,800, so you judge us on what ships.
Our req is frozen until next quarter. Can you cover the gap?+
Yes. It is a common Austin situation, and a good fit for an engagement, because an invoice is not a headcount. The roadmap keeps moving while the req waits. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece, or embed an engineer at $5,400 a month. Runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go, so when your hire does start, they inherit work they can read and extend.
Why not buy an off-the-shelf tool?+
Often you should, and we will tell you when. If a product already does most of what you need, configuring it is cheaper than building. Custom software earns its cost when the process is how you compete, when you pay for several tools to do one job badly, or when the workarounds cost more staff time than the software would.
Can you work with the systems we already have?+
That is usually the job. Most internal tools are valuable because of what they connect to: an ERP, a work-order system, a CRM, a finance package. If it has an API, we integrate with it. If all it offers is a nightly export, we can work with that too, and we will tell you how fresh the data can honestly be.
How do you find out what we actually need?+
By talking to the people who do the work, not only the people who asked for the tool. We watch the spreadsheet being used, collect the edge cases everyone handles from memory, and write the process down before we build anything. The first release covers the core of it; the exceptions follow once people are using it.
What happens to our old data?+
It comes with you. We migrate it, check the counts and totals against the source, and keep the old system or spreadsheet readable until your team is confident nothing was lost. Where the old data is inconsistent, we show you the records that do not fit rather than quietly guessing what they meant.
Who looks after it once it is live?+
You choose. We can stay on at our hourly rate for changes and fixes, or hand it to your own team with runbooks, architecture notes and a recorded walkthrough. Internal tools change as the business changes, so we build them to be changed by someone other than us.