Business automation in St Austell.
This is where Autaimate is based. If your business is losing a day a week to paperwork, or the software you pay for was clearly built for somebody else, we can sit down and work out whether something needs building.
Autaimate is a software studio based in St Austell, Cornwall, building business automation and custom software for local businesses. Commissions start with a £750 scoping session, then run at a fixed price from £8,500, typically live in about four weeks. You own the code.
Why St Austell businesses end up here
St Austell is a working town rather than a tourist one. China clay shaped it, and the industries that grew around that — construction, plant hire, haulage, engineering, the trades that service them — still make up a large share of the businesses here. These are firms where the office is one person, often the owner’s partner, doing the paperwork for eight or ten people out on jobs.
That shape creates a specific problem. The work generates records constantly: certificates, inspection reports, delivery notes, timesheets, quotes. The person doing the writing-up is the same person answering the phone and chasing invoices. When the volume of work goes up, the admin goes up with it, and there is no operations department to absorb it.
The software sold to these businesses is almost always built for somewhere else. Priced per seat, shaped around workflows that assume a head office, and missing the one thing that actually matters — whether it works when there is no signal on a site out past Bugle.
What we build for businesses here
Construction and trades
Certificates and reports that write themselves on site rather than in the evening. BS 7671 calculators, voice-first certification, job costing that reflects how you actually price work rather than how a national platform assumes you do.
Inspection and compliance
Voice-first reporting that produces a standards-referenced PDF before you leave site, working fully offline. Cornwall Play Safety Ltd use ours for BS EN 1176 playground inspections across the county.
Enquiry handling
The phone rings while you are up a ladder and the website form goes to an inbox nobody opens until Friday. An assistant that greets every visitor, captures the enquiry and texts it to your phone within seconds.
Quoting and costing
The spreadsheet one person built that nobody else dares touch. Turned into a proper tool with the logic documented, so it survives that person being on holiday.
Local, and it matters
Autaimate is based in St Austell. Mick Stevenson spent four decades in UK construction and trades before writing any software, which is the reason these builds fit how the work actually happens rather than how somebody in an office imagines it happens.
Cornwall Play Safety Ltd use our voice-first inspection app to produce BS EN 1176 playground reports — spoken on site, finished before leaving, and working with no signal, which matters more here than almost anywhere else in England.
Most of the work happens remotely, but being in the county means an in-person session is straightforward. For a build that has to fit how a business really operates, sitting in the office and watching the process is usually worth the drive.
Frequently asked questions
Are you actually based in St Austell? +
Yes. Autaimate is run from St Austell — not a national agency with a Cornwall landing page and a call centre in a business park somewhere else. That matters mainly because an in-person scoping session is straightforward, and because for a build that has to fit how a business really operates, watching the process happen beats reading a specification about it.
How much does custom software cost for a St Austell business? +
Commissions start with a £750 scoping session, then run at a fixed price from £8,500. The scoping session produces a written scope that belongs to you whether or not you go ahead with the build. Fixed price means the number agreed at the start is the number you pay.
Do you only work with businesses in Cornwall? +
No — we work across the UK, and most of it happens remotely. Being based here just means Cornish businesses get the option of sitting down together, which some prefer and some do not need.
Will it work on site where there is no signal? +
That is one of the first questions we ask, and it drives real design decisions. Our inspection apps work fully offline and sync when a signal returns, because a dropped connection on a job out past Roche should not cost somebody a day of re-typing.
Can you meet in person? +
Yes, and for most local commissions it is the better way to start. Half an hour watching the actual process usually tells us more than an hour of description.
How long does a build take? +
Typically about four weeks from kick-off to a live, working product. Fixed scope is what makes that possible — it forces both sides to decide what actually matters before anything gets built.
Do I own the software afterwards? +
Yes. The repository is transferred to you on delivery. No licence we can revoke, no platform dependency. You can take it to any other developer.
What if an off-the-shelf product would do the job? +
We will tell you at the scoping session and point you at it. A studio that only earns by building has an obvious incentive to say yes to everything, and we would rather have the reputation than the one commission.
Got a process eating a day a week?
Tell us what it is and you will get a straight answer on whether it is worth building something for. If it is not, you will hear that too.