MVP development in Birmingham
Founders coming out of Birmingham's universities and health research often have an idea validated by people who are not yet paying for it: clinicians who like the concept, a pilot site that will try it, an innovation fund that wants to see something working. The next step is a first version real users can touch, built without spending the grant on a platform nobody has asked for yet.
Our fixed-price two-week starter is sized for that step. We agree the one flow the pilot has to prove, build it on a stack you can grow, and hand it over with a written list of what must change before it holds real patient, customer or financial data. The code is yours from the first commit, so the pilot version becomes the foundation of the next one.
Birmingham's software buyers are mostly not software companies. The city runs on financial and professional services: HSBC UK's head office at Centenary Square, the Birmingham office Goldman Sachs opened in 2021 with a technology focus, and the accountancy and law firms around Colmore Row and Snowhill. What they bring us is internal systems rather than consumer products: client portals, case and matter management, reporting that currently takes a week of spreadsheets, and integrations between platforms that different departments bought at different times.
Construction, transport and manufacturing make up the rest. HS2's Curzon Street terminus and the regeneration around it keep engineering consultancies, contractors and their supply chains busy, and those firms run on drawings, inspections, documents and project controls spread across too many tools. Manufacturing brings its own lesson. The 2025 cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover stopped production at its West Midlands plants for weeks and reached deep into the supplier base, and suppliers now want business systems they can restore quickly and integrations that pick up cleanly when they come back.
The city has also watched its council's Oracle programme. The Register reports a forecast cost of £144.4 million against an original estimate of around £19 million, with the finance system still not working as intended. The lesson local buyers draw is the right one: customise less, test the money flows before go-live, and keep the people who use the system in the room. Hiring is competitive but cheaper than London, and the banks and professional firms compete for the same engineers. ITJobsWatch puts the median advertised salary for a software engineer in Birmingham at £70,000 over the six months to September 2026.
Working with us from Birmingham needs no adjustment on your side. Four hours of every working day overlap with yours, set across your morning, so stand-up and the decisions that follow happen live with the engineer who writes the code. The afternoon runs on written updates and pull requests in your own Slack, GitHub and Linear, with runbooks and architecture notes written as the work goes.
We are the right fit for a defined piece of work: an integration, a replacement for the spreadsheet, a portal with a deadline, or the groundwork before your own hire starts. We add senior capacity within days, begin with a fixed-price two-week piece so you can judge the output, and work white-label under your name for agencies.
Four ways this arrives.
Every feature is marked essential. We work with you to find the one journey a user must complete for the idea to be proven or disproven, build that properly, and write the rest down as a list for after launch.
It was built with a no-code tool or over a weekend, and real users are now finding its limits. We keep what works, move the data somewhere you own, and rebuild the parts that break without taking the product offline.
A demo that works in the meeting and then has to become the product. We build it on a real database with real sign-in from the start, so the version you demo is the version you keep, not a mock-up you throw away.
You need someone to make the technical decisions and explain them in plain language. We write down every choice that is expensive to reverse, why we made it and what changing it would cost, so whoever you hire next can pick it up.
Began in 2024 as a script that turned monthly exports into charts, and grew step by step into a web app, a mobile app, a technician phone page and the one backend under all three.
Read the write-up →Asked by Birmingham teams.
How do you work with teams in Birmingham?+
Four hours of every working day overlap with yours, set across your Birmingham morning, so stand-up and the day's decisions happen live. We join your calls and work in your tools: Slack, GitHub and Linear. You talk directly to the engineer who writes the code. The afternoon carries on in pull requests and written updates you can read when you are back at your desk, with runbooks and architecture notes written as we go.
Do you build for Birmingham law and accountancy firms?+
Yes. For the firms around Colmore Row and Snowhill we build client portals that work on a phone and ask for each piece of information once, matter and case management tools, and reports that assemble themselves instead of taking a week of spreadsheets. For accountancy practices we build AI features that pull figures from bank statements and receipts, suggest categories and put the result in front of an accountant to approve.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Birmingham?+
ITJobsWatch puts the median advertised salary for a software engineer in Birmingham at around £70,000. Our published rate is $35/hour with a $5,000 minimum engagement. There is no recruiting time and no employment overhead, and we can start within days of the first call. Most clients begin with a fixed-price two-week piece at $2,800, which lets you judge us on working software before committing to more.
Should we replace our ERP or build around it?+
Usually build around it, at least first. Birmingham has seen what heavy customisation can cost. Most of the pain sits in the gaps between an ERP and the rest of the business, and every customisation makes the ERP harder to upgrade. We build small tools alongside it that talk to it through supported interfaces. If replacement is genuinely the answer, we will say so and set out what to test before go-live.
What does the fixed-price two-week starter cover?+
A defined slice of the product, agreed in writing before we start. For an MVP it is usually the core flow, working end to end against a real database. It costs $2,800. You get something running at the end and you keep the code either way, so you can judge us on output before committing to the rest of the build.
How long does an MVP take?+
It depends on what the smallest honest version is, which is why we scope before we quote. The two-week starter usually answers the question: by the end of it one flow works, and you have a written estimate for the rest with its assumptions listed. We would rather cut scope with you than promise a date we would miss.
Why Next.js and PostgreSQL?+
Because they are boring in the right way. Both are widely known, so you can hire for them later. Postgres will carry you a long way past your first paying customers, and Next.js gives you a web app and an API in one codebase. If the product is mobile-first, we build the app in React Native on the same backend.
Will we have to rewrite it later?+
Not if we do our job. The shortcuts we take are in scope, not in structure: fewer features, plainer screens, manual steps behind the scenes. The data model, sign-in, permissions and deploys are built properly from the first week, because those are the parts that force a rewrite when they are wrong.
Who owns the code and the accounts?+
You do, from the first commit. Repositories, hosting, domains and payment accounts are created in your name, not ours. If we set something up ourselves to save time, we transfer it to you before the first invoice. An MVP you cannot take to another team is a liability, not an asset.