Custom software development in Chennai
Chennai's port and its surrounding industrial belt support a large community of freight forwarders, customs brokers, transporters and warehouse operators. Much of their work is paperwork moving between parties: bookings, bills of lading, customs documents, delivery orders and invoices, tracked in spreadsheets and email threads. When a container is delayed, finding out why means phoning three people.
We build the internal system that puts each shipment in one place. A web app for the operations team showing every job, its documents and its status; a phone page for drivers and warehouse staff to record handovers with photos; integrations with the accounting software you already use; and one backend under all of it. FM360, the operations platform we built for a healthcare estate, follows the same pattern. We start with the job that generates the most phone calls.
Chennai is where Indian SaaS learned to sell to the world. Zoho is headquartered here and has grown without venture capital. Freshworks was founded here in 2010 by two former Zoho employees, and Chargebee was started in a Chennai apartment a year later by a team with Zoho roots, with Freshworks as an early customer. That lineage produced a distinctive kind of company: product-led, careful with money, selling to small and mid-sized businesses on several continents from offices in Chennai. Chennai's SaaS teams tend to be strong on product and short on specific capacity, not on talent in general.
The city's second identity is industrial. Chennai is often called the Detroit of Asia, with vehicle plants including Hyundai's and BMW's on its outskirts, a large base of component and electronics manufacturers, and a major port. Those firms have the same problem as manufacturers everywhere in India: their operations have outgrown the spreadsheets and older systems that run them, and their information arrives late and in the wrong format. Around the port, freight forwarders, customs brokers and warehouse operators face the same problem with paperwork instead of parts, and the cost of a lost document is a container that sits on the quay.
Its third is healthcare. Chennai is often called the health capital of India, and hospital groups such as Apollo Hospitals and specialist centres such as Sankara Nethralaya draw patients from across the country and abroad. Healthcare software here has to earn trust. Health records are among the most sensitive data there is, and hospital systems increasingly need to exchange data with each other and with the national digital health stack rather than sit in isolation. Referrals, international patient coordination, patient apps and group-wide reporting all need building. Getting consent, access logging and integration right matters more than the interface.
We are in Bengaluru and share your time zone, so the working day is the same on both sides and a question asked in the morning is answered that morning. You talk directly to the engineer who writes the code. Most of the work happens in your repository, your issue tracker and a shared chat channel, which suits teams used to working in writing, and the runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go.
We are the right fit for a defined piece outside your team's usual specialism, a migration with an end date, or the gap while your next hire serves their notice. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece and judge us on what ships. Chennai agencies and product studios can also bring us in white-label, 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 Chennai teams.
How do you work with teams in Chennai?+
We are in Bengaluru and share your time zone, so calls, reviews and releases fit inside your normal working day. We work in your tools, Slack, GitHub and Linear or whatever your team already uses, and most of the conversation happens in writing, where it lasts. You talk directly to the engineer writing the code, from the first 30-minute call onwards, and runbooks and architecture notes are written into your repository as we go.
Can you work inside a mature SaaS product without slowing our team down?+
Yes. We read your code and conventions before changing anything, follow your review and release process, and take a defined piece of work, such as a billing migration, a new integration, a performance problem or an infrastructure move, so the changes stay in one place rather than spreading across the product. We work in Node, Python and TypeScript, inside your repository, and leave runbooks and architecture notes for your team.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Chennai?+
PayScale puts a mid-career software engineer in Chennai at about ₹12 lakh a year. Our published rate is $35 an hour, with a $5,000 minimum. That buys a senior engineer who writes the code, works in your Slack, GitHub and Linear, and starts within days, with no recruiting round, notice period or employment overhead. Begin with a fixed-price two-week piece at $2,800 and judge us on what ships.
Can you build software for Chennai's hospitals?+
Yes. FM360, the platform we built for a healthcare estate, runs its facilities and maintenance in production. For hospitals and diagnostic chains we build referral and patient-coordination platforms, patient apps in Tamil and English, and warehouses that join every branch's systems into one set of numbers. Consent is recorded per purpose, every access to a record is logged, and integrations use standards such as FHIR where the other side supports them.
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.