Replace the software you're stuck renewing with software that's yours to run.
The renewal arrives every year whether or not the software got better, and the one thing you actually need still isn't in it. A replacement is software built for your business, on terms agreed with you rather than handed to you.
Start a conversation →You already know which system this is.
- The renewal goes up again, and nobody can question the line item.
- A change you need takes a quote, a queue, and a release date that isn't yours.
- It doesn't talk to anything else you run, so someone re-keys the data by hand.
- The one report the business actually needs gets rebuilt in a spreadsheet every month.
- You're being moved off the version you're on, on a schedule you didn't pick.
- You pay per seat for people who use one screen of it.
None of that gets fixed by another renewal. It's the arrangement: the system was built for a market, the terms came with it, and someone else owns the roadmap.
Where this usually starts.
The work tends to arrive in one of these shapes.
Replace a system you're renewing
A custom replacement built around the way your business actually works, rather than the way a vendor's product happens to work. When it's done, it's yours to run.
Connect the systems you're keeping
An integration between tools you already pay for, so the data moves without anyone re-keying it. This is usually the smallest first piece, and the clearest way to see how the work goes.
Build the part no product sells
Custom software for the piece of your business that doesn't look like anybody else's — the reason the off-the-shelf option never quite fit.
Production-grade, not proof-of-concept.
A replacement has to do, on the day it goes live, everything the old system did — including the parts nobody wrote down. So the unglamorous work is the work: the edge cases living in your data, the report someone depends on every quarter, the integration that only breaks at month end. That's what gets built, and it's what gets tested.
How a first project goes.
I start with one bounded piece — an integration, or one workflow out of the system you're replacing — and build it to production standard. You get working software in front of you early, and you decide whether the rest is worth doing before it's built.
AI does a great deal of the typing; the engineering judgment, the review and the accountability are mine. I read every line that ships, and I'm the person you'll be talking to from the first message onward.
How the engagement is set up — including what happens to the software afterward, whether you own it outright or license it — is settled with you as part of scoping the work, not fixed in advance. That part doesn't come with the software.
About the founder →What does the current system cost you in a year?
That's the number worth putting in your first message — all in: licences, seats, support, and the hours people spend working around it. Then add the one thing it still can't do.
You don't need an exact figure. A number you'd defend in a meeting is enough to tell whether replacing it is worth doing at all.