Custom software development in Miami
Behind Miami's startup scene is an older economy of property developers, hospitality groups, importers and family offices, and many of them run on spreadsheets that one person understands. The sales pipeline for a building, the room allocation for an event, the landed cost of a container: each lives in a workbook that is emailed around and quietly disagrees with its copies.
We build internal software that replaces those workbooks without asking the business to change how it thinks. We start by sitting with the people who use the spreadsheet, writing down what it actually does, including the parts nobody remembers adding, and then build a small web application with proper records, permissions and history. It usually replaces one workbook first, and earns the next one.
Miami's software buyers tend to face south. Many of the companies that set up here in the last few years came for the same reason: it is where a US-incorporated business can sit next to its Latin American customers, investors and staff. Cross-border payments, remittances, neobanks, crypto infrastructure and the US arms of Latin American companies make up a large part of the local technology market, alongside real estate, hospitality and trade. The systems they need are rarely built for one country.
That shapes the work. Money movement is the core of the product rather than a feature bolted onto it: idempotent payment calls, a double-entry ledger, reconciliation jobs that compare your records against a partner's settlement file every night and flag the difference. The product has to handle Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese properly, validate local ID numbers and address formats, and settle through rails such as Pix in Brazil and SPEI in Mexico as well as cards. Crypto products add wallets, chain indexers and custody integrations, and the same principle applies: your database has to agree with the chain, and when it drifts, somebody needs a report saying where. Real estate, hospitality and trade bring their own version of the problem, usually a workbook that runs the business and quietly disagrees with its copies.
The hiring market has moved with the migration of finance and technology firms from New York and California. Built In puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Miami at around $145,000, and engineers who are bilingual and have shipped payments work are the hardest seat to fill. That is the seat we fill for a defined build: a payments integration, a reconciliation system, a second-country launch, or the months while a permanent hire is found. Work starts with a fixed-price two-week piece, and the code belongs to you from the first commit.
We move our working day for Florida. Four hours of every working day overlap with your morning in Eastern time, stand-up included, so calls, code review and decisions happen live with the engineer who writes the code. Everything else is written down where you already work, and runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go, so the next engineer who joins can read how the money moves.
We are the right fit for a defined build: a payments integration, a reconciliation system, a second-country launch. Senior capacity starts within days, the first piece is a fixed-price two-week engagement, and we can cover the months while a permanent hire is found. Agencies serving Miami's fintech, hospitality and retail brands 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 Miami teams.
How do you work with teams in Miami?+
We are in Bengaluru and move our working day for Florida, so four hours of every working day overlap with your morning in Eastern time, stand-up included. Calls, code review and decisions happen in that window. Everything else is written down in your own tools, whether that is Slack, GitHub or Linear, and the person on every call is the engineer who writes the code.
Can you build for Latin American markets as well as the US?+
Yes, and it is more than translation. Mexican and Argentinian Spanish differ, Brazilian Portuguese is its own language, and ID numbers, address formats, currencies and instalment payments all change by country. We design localisation into the first component, format money through the platform's own internationalisation tools, and integrate the payments provider you have chosen, with room for a second provider and local rails such as Pix and SPEI.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Miami?+
Built In puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Miami at about $145,000, 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 working code.
Can you work white-label for a Miami agency?+
Yes. Miami agencies regularly win fintech, hospitality and ecommerce projects that need more engineering than the in-house team can take on at once. We work under your name as part of your team, so your client deals with you and the work arrives as yours. The NDA comes before any specifics, the code belongs to the client from the first commit, and runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go.
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.