MVP development in Edinburgh
A fintech founder in Edinburgh can usually get a meeting with a bank's innovation team long before they have a product. The meeting goes well; the next step is a proof of concept against the bank's sandbox, on the bank's timetable, and a founding team of two cannot build that and keep selling at the same time.
Our fixed-price two-week starter is built for that step. We agree the one flow the proof of concept must demonstrate, build it against the sandbox or test data, and hand it over with a written list of what would need to change before anything goes near production. If two weeks is the wrong size for what the bank has asked, we will say so on the first call.
Edinburgh is a money town with a major research university in the middle of it, and its software work reflects both. On one side sit the fund managers, life and pensions firms and banks: Baillie Gifford, NatWest Group's headquarters at Gogarburn, and a long tail of platforms, administrators and wealth managers. On the other side sit the University of Edinburgh's informatics and data science groups, and EPCC, which hosts the national supercomputer ARCHER2 and was chosen in 2025 as home for the next one, with up to £750 million of government funding.
The financial side needs systems that are careful rather than fast. Pension and investment products carry decades of rules, and much of the administration runs on platforms that predate the people maintaining them. Customers expect to see their pot, their charges and their options clearly on a screen, and advisers expect the platform to answer as fast as the one they used yesterday. So the work is usually integration, data, reporting and customer screens around an old core, with every change tested before it ships. Fintechs sit in between, often selling back into those same banks and fund managers.
The university side needs something different: research code that works on a GPU in a lab and has to become a product that works for a paying customer. That gap, between a model that is right and a service that is reliable, is where many spin-outs stall. Hiring is competitive. ITJobsWatch puts the median advertised software engineer salary in Edinburgh at £70,000 over the six months to September 2026, on a smaller sample than London, and the banks and fund managers take many of the experienced engineers.
Working with us from Edinburgh fits the day you already have. Four hours of every working day overlap with yours, set across your morning, so stand-up, review and the decisions that follow happen live with the engineer who writes the code. The rest of the day runs on written updates and pull requests in your own Slack, GitHub and Linear, waiting for you after lunch, with runbooks and architecture notes written as the work goes.
We are the right fit for a defined piece of work, a spin-out's first production system, or a project that needs senior engineers this quarter while your own hiring catches up. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece and judge us on what ships. For agencies, we work white-label under your name, in your repositories and tools.
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 Edinburgh teams.
How do you work with teams in Edinburgh?+
Four hours of every working day overlap with yours, set across your Edinburgh morning, so stand-up and code review 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 rest of the day carries on in pull requests and written updates that are waiting for you after lunch, with runbooks and architecture notes written as we go.
Do you build for Edinburgh fund managers and pensions firms?+
Yes. For pensions and investment platforms we build services around the administration core: APIs that expose what it knows, transfers and switches processed exactly once, and tools for the exception cases that live in spreadsheets today. For fund managers we build investment data pipelines that trace every figure back to its feed, research search that cites its sources, and customer screens that make pots and charges clear.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Edinburgh?+
ITJobsWatch puts the median advertised salary for a software engineer in Edinburgh at around £70,000. Our published rate is $35/hour with a $5,000 minimum, or $5,400 a month for one engineer embedded in your team. There is no recruiting time and no employment overhead, and we can start within days of the first call. A fixed-price two-week piece at $2,800 lets you judge us on output first.
Can you work with a university spin-out?+
Yes, and it is a good fit. Spin-outs usually have strong research code and nobody whose job is running it in production. The research team stays in charge of the science, and we build what surrounds it: the API, the data handling, the deployment and the monitoring. A fixed-price two-week piece fits a grant or accelerator budget, and the code belongs to the company from the first commit.
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.