01
Operations run on spreadsheets and glue
The process that got you to 50 people lives in spreadsheets, inboxes, and automation duct tape. Every new hire adds another workaround, and one wrong cell now costs real money.
Services
Custom software development
Off-the-shelf tools stop fitting the moment your process becomes your advantage. We design and build software around how your business actually runs — with senior engineers who scope in weeks, ship to staging weekly, and hand over a system your team can operate without us.
Who this is for
You’ll recognize the situation
02
The rewrite keeps getting rejected
The core system is six years old, every estimate against it doubles in flight, and the full rewrite has been proposed and shelved twice — because a year-long freeze would sink the roadmap.
03
The last vendor shipped and vanished
You paid for a build and inherited a black box: no documentation, no tests, and no one left who can explain why anything works. You need software your own team can take over.
What’s included
Custom software, itemized
Product discovery and scoping
Two weeks inside your workflow and codebase producing a written build plan — scope, architecture, milestones, and a first release date you can hold us to.
Architecture and system design
Boring-by-choice architecture documented in ADRs: boundaries that match your team structure, and no technology chosen because it was interesting.
API and backend development
Typed, versioned APIs with contract tests and migration paths — built so the mobile team, the data team, and your integrators stop guessing.
Web application development
Production web apps with accessibility, performance budgets, and error tracking wired in from the first sprint, not retrofitted before launch.
Legacy modernization
Strangler-pattern migrations that replace the old system a slice at a time behind flags — the roadmap keeps shipping while the risk drains out.
Handover and support
Runbooks, ADRs, and pairing sessions from week one, then a support window sized to your team. The exit is designed at the start, not negotiated at the end.
How it runs
Four phases, no surprises
01
Diagnose
Two weeks in your domain and code. You get a written read on scope, risk, and sequencing — useful even if you never hire us for the build.
02
Plan
A milestone plan with named engineers and a first production release inside six weeks. Anything that can't ship early gets questioned hard.
03
Build
Weekly releases to a staging environment you can open. Demos every Friday; decisions recorded in ADRs the day they're made.
04
Scale
Hardening, observability, and load work once real users arrive — then a documented handover to your team, with us on call as long as you want.
6 wks
median time to first production release
94%
of milestones hit on the planned date
100%
of engagements delivered with runbooks and ADRs
Illustrative figures from anonymized engagement profiles.
Case study
What that looks like shipped
The six-year-old React SPA behind a US course-authoring SaaS was losing signups to its own load time. A route-by-route replatform took LCP from 4.3s to 1.2s — and trial conversion followed.
Read the full case study
In depth
What a fixed bid really buys you
A fixed bid feels like certainty: one number, one signature, one deliverable. What the number actually contains is a risk premium. A vendor quoting a fixed price against an unfamiliar codebase and an evolving product has to price every unknown as if it will go wrong, so the bid carries padding you pay whether or not the risk lands. Worse, the incentive flips the day you sign — once the price is locked, the vendor's margin depends on defending the spec, and every discovery you make about your own product becomes a change-order negotiation.
Fixed price does work where the edges are hard: an audit, a bounded migration, a discovery phase with a defined output. That is exactly where we use it. For the build itself we run milestone pricing with a capped monthly burn — not because it shifts risk onto you, but because it changes what we are paid for. Under a fixed bid, the profitable move is defending the spec. Under capped milestones, the profitable move is shipping the next release, and that is the only incentive worth buying.
So when you compare bids from any custom software development company, ignore the headline number and ask where the risk sits: in a premium you pay up front, or in an estimate you can inspect milestone by milestone. Then ask what happens to the price when you learn something mid-build — because you will. Industry post-mortems on mid-market builds commonly put change orders at 20 to 40% on top of the original fixed bid. The cheapest signature is often the most expensive project.
Build or buy: the judgment you're actually paying for
The rule we apply in every discovery is old and still right: buy the parts of your business that look like everyone else's, and build the part that wins you deals. Auth, billing, support desks, analytics — buy them, because a vendor with ten thousand customers will maintain them better than any custom build. The workflow your customers chose you for is different: bend it to fit an off-the-shelf tool and you have traded away the thing that made you worth choosing. A firm that answers build to everything is selling you capacity, not judgment.
The decision has arithmetic behind it, so we do the arithmetic. Per-seat SaaS pricing scales with headcount whether or not value does: a tool at a typical $49 a seat across 300 people runs about $175,000 a year, every year — before counting the workarounds where the tool doesn't fit your process. A build is a larger number once, plus a maintenance tail. In discovery we put both curves in the same spreadsheet, mark the crossover, and let the recommendation follow the numbers instead of our revenue.
The honest half of the tradeoff is that tail. Custom software makes you the vendor: you own the upgrades, the security patches, and the roadmap, and that costs real engineering time every year. So when a SaaS covers 90% of a workflow and the missing 10% isn't where your margin lives, we will tell you to buy it and integrate. We have written exactly that into discovery reports, and it costs us build revenue every time — it is also usually why the client sends the next, harder problem our way.
A handover your team can run without us
Here is the test we design against: six months after our last invoice, your team ships a feature, debugs a production incident, and onboards a new engineer — without messaging anyone at QuantmHill. Most vendor lock-in is not contractual; it is epistemic. The code is yours on paper while the understanding of it lives in someone else's heads, and that gap is what quietly turns a finished project into a permanent support contract.
Closing that gap is unglamorous work that starts on day one. Everything is built in your repositories from the first commit. Every architectural decision is recorded the day it is made, along with the options we rejected and why. Runbooks are rehearsed by your on-call engineers, not filed by ours. And your team merges code into the system while we are still building it — on a replatform for a US course-authoring SaaS, the client's engineers were shipping onto the new stack from week three, which is why week sixteen was an ending rather than a cliff.
The final milestone is a drill, not a party. One of your engineers takes a change from ticket to production while we watch. We run an incident game day against staging and time the diagnosis. Whatever the drill exposes, we fix before we leave, and then the support window is sized to your team — a few weeks for a strong in-house group, longer if you are hiring behind us. When you hire a development partner, ask them to describe their last handover at this level of detail. If the answer is a page of ongoing support packages, you are being offered a lease.
Tools we reach for
A boring, hireable stack
Chosen so your team can maintain, extend, and hire for everything we leave behind.
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- React
- Next.js
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- AWS
- Terraform
FAQ
The questions buyers actually ask
Answered the way we’d answer them on a call — specifics included.
Fixed-price discovery (two weeks, fixed fee), then time-and-materials against a milestone plan with a capped monthly burn. You see the estimate per milestone before we start it, and you can stop at any milestone boundary with 30 days' notice. We don't do open-ended retainers for build work — they reward slowness.
You do. Work happens in your repositories under your organization from the first commit, the contract assigns all IP to you on payment, and we use no proprietary frameworks that could lock you in. If we part ways mid-project, settling the last invoice leaves you owning everything written to date.
A minimum of four hours of overlap with your working day, written into the statement of work. Standups happen in your morning, and the engineers building your system are the ones on those calls — we don't route questions through an account manager.
The two-week discovery is the ramp-up: by the end of it the team has run your workflow, read your code, and written the plan. First production code typically lands in week three, and the first release inside six weeks. If we can't get productive that fast, we'll say so before you've committed to a build.
Least-privilege access under your SSO, credentials in your secrets manager, and no production data on our machines — we work against masked or synthetic datasets. We sign your NDA and DPA, and we're comfortable operating inside SOC 2 and ISO 27001 environments and their audits.
Every engagement has milestone-boundary exits with 30 days' notice and no termination fee. Because we ship weekly and document as we go, what exists at any exit point is runnable and handover-ready — you lose the team, not the work. We'd rather make leaving easy than trap an unhappy client.
They will, and the model assumes it. Scope inside an unstarted milestone can be swapped without ceremony; genuinely new scope gets an estimate you approve before anyone writes code against it. Because releases hit staging weekly, you find out a requirement was wrong within days — when changing it is cheap — rather than at acceptance testing. What we never do is silently absorb scope until the deadline breaks: every change shows up in the plan the week it happens.
Most of our work starts inside a system someone else built. Discovery includes a code audit, so we form our own read on what is salvageable instead of trusting the folklore around it. Our default is a strangler migration — replacing the risky parts a slice at a time behind flags — because a from-scratch rewrite is usually the most expensive way to fix a codebase. And if the audit says the foundation is sound, we will tell you to keep it and build on top.
The engineers who run your discovery are the engineers who build, and they are named in the statement of work. We don't sell with senior faces and staff with juniors, and we don't subcontract. If someone does rotate off during a long engagement, you get notice, an overlap period with their replacement, and a documentation trail that makes the new engineer's first week onboarding rather than archaeology. Team changes we initiate never change your rate.
Related services
Services often paired with this one
Have something ambitious in mind?
Tell us where you're headed. We'll reply within one business day with an honest read on whether we can help.