Nobody goes shopping for a development platform. They go looking for a fix to something specific that is costing them time, money or sleep. These are the ten problems we are asked about most often, each written up properly: what tends to be going wrong, what we build instead, which parts of the platform do the work, and — because it saves everyone time — when you would be better off with something else.
Somewhere in your business there is an Access database or a workbook that runs a real process, was built by someone who has left, and lives on one machine that nobody is allowed to turn off. We move systems like that onto the web without rewriting them from scratch — the data comes across, the rules come with it, and you get permissions, auditing, backups and an API you never had.
Customer-facingYour customers phone and e-mail to ask for information you already hold. Someone looks it up and re-types it into a reply. A portal fixes that, but only if you can be certain that each customer sees their own records and nothing else — which is the part that makes people nervous, and the part the platform handles rather than leaving to your code.
CaseworkCasework has a shape that generic software rarely fits: a referral arrives from somewhere unpredictable, someone assesses it, a person owns it, things happen over weeks or months, and at the end a funder or a commissioner wants evidence of what changed. We build systems around that shape rather than asking your service to adopt someone else's.
OperationsSomewhere between a request and a decision, your process leaves the system and becomes a shared workbook, a chain of forwarded e-mails and someone chasing. It works, mostly, until an auditor asks who approved a particular thing and on what basis — and the answer has to be reconstructed from a mailbox.
CommercialYou have a process clients pay for. Someone has pointed out that the process is the product and you could sell it as software. They are usually right — and the reason it does not happen is that tenancy, onboarding, tiering and billing are roughly a year of engineering before the first customer sees anything worth paying for.
RegulatedBooking software is a solved problem right up to the point where the booking has rules — multiple sites with different availability, capacity that is not simply a headcount, attendance that has to be evidenced, and an inspector who wants a report the off-the-shelf product does not produce.
ERPMost home-grown order and invoicing systems have the same defect, and it is nearly always discovered by accident. The totals are worked out in the browser, which means they are worked out somewhere the user can reach — and anything that writes to the line table without going through a form leaves every total downstream quietly wrong.
SalesYou are paying per seat for a CRM that models somebody else's sales process. Half of it does not apply, the half you need does not quite fit, and the delivery data that would tell you what a customer is genuinely worth lives in a different system entirely.
Financial servicesApplications arrive as PDFs and identity documents arrive as phone photographs attached to e-mail. Someone eyeballs a passport against a form. When the regulator asks how a decision was reached, the evidence is scattered across a mailbox and the identity check was a person's judgement with nothing behind it.
IntegrationFinance, operations and the website each hold a version of the truth, and the reconciliation between them is a person. It works, it is expensive, and it is the kind of cost that never appears on a budget line because it is distributed across six people's weeks.
These are the ten we are asked for most often, not the limit of what the platform builds. If your problem is not here, describe it to us in plain English and we will tell you honestly whether it fits.