An engineering company that also designs

We are an engineering company that also designs, rather than a design agency that also codes. The difference shows up in what we argue about: running costs, failure modes, what happens in year three.

We are deliberately not large. The team that designs your schema is the team that gets the alert at two in the morning, which turns out to be an unusually effective constraint on design decisions. There is no account layer between you and the people writing the code.

• The right stack, not our favourite one

  Laravel, Next.js, React, PHP, whatever the work actually needs, on AWS or Google Cloud. What we will not do is pick something because it is new. A large hiring pool and a long support horizon matter more than novelty, because a developer who joins in year three has to be able to read code written in year one. We optimise for the decade rather than the demo.

• The running cost is part of the design

  A system that costs a fortune to operate is a system you will be asked to replace, and the decisions that drive that bill are architectural rather than operational. We would rather ship something modest that costs very little to run and can grow than something impressive that arrives with a bill nobody budgeted for.

• Accessibility is engineering, not compliance

  We build to WCAG 2.2 AA and IS 5568 while writing the code rather than as a remediation pass. It costs almost nothing done that way and a great deal done afterwards, and the same work makes software usable on a mid range phone on a bad connection, which is most people.

• Saying no is part of the job

  A good proportion of the projects we are asked about are better solved with something cheaper than us: a configurable tool, a rules engine instead of a model, performance work instead of a replatform. We say so during discovery, including when it costs us the larger project. We have been doing this long enough to know that the alternative is a client who is unhappy for a year and then leaves.

Fast, when fast is what the work needs. Campaign timelines are days, not quarters, and a good part of our work runs at that pace. The longer phased approach below is how we build platforms, not how we answer every brief.

Most engagements start with a short paid discovery: what exists, what it costs to run, where it will break next, and what you are actually trying to achieve. The output is an architecture, a phased plan and an estimate, written so that you could hand it to another firm if you wanted to.

Then we build in phases that each end in something usable, starting deliberately narrow: one real workflow, in production, with real users. Something that reaches production in eight weeks and grows is worth more than something complete in a year, because the second one is complete according to assumptions nobody has tested.

We stay on afterwards. Most of our relationships are measured in years.

We build and run our own software on the same kinds of stack we put clients on. It keeps us honest: the operational advice we give is advice we are living with.

• irua.appReal time web application
• wagate.appWhatsApp Business API platform

A meaningful part of our work is as the engineering team behind another agency, where they own the client relationship and the creative and we build and run what sits underneath. We are comfortable being the supplier nobody sees, and we do not approach your clients.

We are a Meta Official Tech Provider, and we build on AWS, primarily in the il-central-1 region, and on Google Cloud where a client is already there.

• Meta Official Tech Provider
• AWS
• Google Cloud