Custom software development in Mumbai
Behind Mumbai's headline industries sit thousands of established businesses: traders, distributors, logistics firms around the port, manufacturers with an office in the city and a plant outside it. Many run their operation on spreadsheets, exports from their accounting software and phone calls. The owner knows the business in detail, but the information arrives late, by message, and in someone else's format.
We build the internal system that puts it in one place. A web app for the office, a phone page or mobile app for the people in the warehouse or on the road, integrations with the accounting and ERP software you already use, and one backend under all of it. FM360, the operations platform we built for a healthcare estate, has exactly that shape. We start by watching how the work is actually done, then replace the most painful spreadsheet first.
Mumbai is India's financial capital. Both major stock exchanges are here, and so are many of the country's banks, NBFCs, brokers, wealth managers, insurers and fintechs. For these companies software is judged first on whether the money is right. A loan ledger that drifts from the bank statement, a payout released twice because a partner timed out, a portfolio screen showing yesterday's price: each one lands on an operations desk the next morning. What they need built is rarely a new product from nothing. It is a lending or payments backend that reconciles, a platform where each role sees exactly what it should, and approvals that need two people before money moves. Engineers who have built those systems are in demand across the city, so the work often waits for a hire.
The city's second industry is attention. The Hindi film industry, most of the country's television networks and many of its large publishers are based here, and their software problems are specific: traffic that arrives all at once on a release or a match day, rights and metadata that decide what can be shown where, and archives that are valuable only if someone can search them. A slow page on a publisher's site is lost revenue, because the readers came from search and will go straight back to it.
The third is consumer business in every size. Mumbai has D2C brands selling beauty, fashion and food through their own stores and every marketplace at once, and it is home to large family-owned groups and conglomerates whose older divisions still run on spreadsheets and exports from their accounting software. In the bigger groups the buyer is usually a digital team with a mandate, a budget and a procurement process, and the work has to survive that process as well as production.
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 the same morning. You talk directly to the engineer who writes the code. The work happens in your repository and a shared chat channel, where every decision is written down, and the runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go rather than at the end.
We are the right fit when a Mumbai team has a defined piece of work and wants a senior engineer on it within days: a ledger that has to reconcile, a migration with an end date, or extra capacity while you hire. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece, or bring us in white-label for your agency's clients under your 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 Mumbai teams.
How do you work with teams in Mumbai?+
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 every decision is written down in the repository or the channel. You talk directly to the engineer writing the code, from the first 30-minute call through to handover, with runbooks and architecture notes written as we go.
Do you build for Mumbai lenders, brokers and fintechs?+
Yes. We build the parts where the money has to be right: loan and payment ledgers that reconcile against the bank's records every day, retries that cannot turn a timeout into a double payout, maker-checker approvals where a second person signs off before money moves, and a full history of every change of state. We work inside the system you already run, in Node, Python and Next.js, and ship in increments.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Mumbai?+
PayScale puts a mid-career software engineer in Mumbai at about ₹15 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. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece at $2,800 and judge us on the output before committing to more.
Can you work white-label for our Mumbai agency?+
Yes. Mumbai's digital and media agencies bring us in when a client needs a backend, a mobile app or a data pipeline alongside the design and campaign work. We work under your name, in your client's repositories and your channels, and sign an NDA before specifics. The code belongs to the client from the first commit. You keep the relationship, we write the code and the runbooks, and your team presents the work.
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.