Custom software for UK small businesses.
Built for one business, priced like a product. Fixed scope, fixed price, roughly four weeks — and the repository is yours when it ships.
If an off-the-shelf product already does the job, we will tell you at the scoping session.
Autaimate builds custom software for UK small and medium businesses on a fixed price. Commissions start with a £750 scoping session, then run from £8,500, typically live in about four weeks. The client owns the code and the repository on delivery, with no licence and no platform lock-in.
When custom software is the right answer
Four situations where commissioning beats buying. If none of these describe you, buy the product.
The tool you need does not exist
Every product in the Autaimate portfolio started here. Someone had a workflow specific enough that nobody had built for it — voice-first playground inspection to BS EN 1176, crane hire costing, multilingual equipment safety for care homes. If you have searched properly and found nothing, that is a signal rather than a dead end.
The generic platform makes you work its way
You are paying per seat, using a fraction of the features, and bending your process around somebody else’s assumptions. The honest test: if the real record still lives in a spreadsheet on the side, the platform is not fitting and no amount of configuration will make it fit.
The process is your competitive advantage
If the way you do something is genuinely better than how your competitors do it, off-the-shelf software will flatten that difference away. That is the case where bespoke earns its cost — you are protecting the thing that makes you worth hiring.
Compliance is specific to your sector
BS 7671, BS EN 1176, CQC, UK GDPR. Generic tools handle none of them properly because the market is too small to be worth their while. It is exactly the right size for a commissioned build.
When it is not
A studio that only earns by building has an obvious incentive to say yes. These are the three cases where we say no.
A product already does the job
Accounting, payroll, general project management, email. These are solved. Buy the product, spend the money elsewhere. We will tell you this at the scoping session rather than after taking a deposit.
The process is broken rather than manual
Automating a broken process makes the wrong thing happen faster and more expensively. Sometimes the fix is changing how work is passed between people, not building software to move it faster.
Nobody can describe what it should do
If the requirement is "something to help with admin", it is not ready. Building against a vague brief is how projects run to three times the estimate. The scoping session exists to force the specifics out before anyone commits.
How a commission works
Scoping session
A paid session that defines the process, the deliverable and the price. You get a written scope out of it whether or not you go ahead. This is also the point at which we will tell you if a product already does the job.
Fixed quote
One number, agreed before anything is built, covering the whole scope. No hourly meter, no change requests that quietly double the bill. If the scope genuinely changes, we requote rather than pretending it did not.
Build
Roughly four weeks for most commissions. Fixed scope is what makes that possible — it forces both sides to decide what actually matters before a line of code is written.
Handover
The repository is transferred to you. Code, documentation, deployment configuration. You can keep it private, hand it to another developer, or expand it into a product you sell to your own industry.
What it is built on
Published deliberately. You are buying an asset you will own, so you should know what it is made of before you commission it.
Front end
React 18 with TypeScript and Tailwind CSS, or Astro for content-led sites where shipping zero JavaScript matters more than interactivity. Chosen because any competent developer can pick them up — you are never dependent on us.
Data and security
PostgreSQL with row-level security on every tenant table, pgcrypto encryption for special-category data, audit logging on every state-changing operation, and uniform responses on delete endpoints so records cannot be enumerated.
Infrastructure
Cloudflare Workers at the edge for speed and cost, with UK and EU data residency available on request. Static output wherever possible, because the fastest and most reliable request is the one that never reaches a server.
The rest
Clerk for authentication, Stripe for payments, Resend for transactional email, Cloudflare R2 for file storage. Boring, documented, stable choices. Fashion is expensive to maintain.
Who builds it
Autaimate is a one-person product studio. Mick Stevenson spent four decades in UK construction and trades before writing any software. The failure mode in this work is a developer who has never done the job designing a tool for people who do it daily — knowing what paperwork an inspection actually generates is why our builds get used rather than opened twice and abandoned.
One person also means no account managers, no handover between a salesperson and a delivery team, and no discovering after signature that the people who scoped it are not the people building it. The person you talk to is the person who writes the code.
Frequently asked questions
How much does custom software cost for a UK small business? +
Autaimate commissions start with a £750 scoping session, then run at a fixed price from £8,500. Larger scopes cost more, but the number is agreed before any building starts and does not move. That is deliberately a fraction of what an enterprise software house charges for comparable work, because the client base is small businesses rather than corporates.
What is the difference between custom software and bespoke software development? +
Nothing meaningful — they are the same thing under different names, along with "commissioned software" and "custom web application development". All describe software built for one business rather than sold as a product to many. The distinction that actually matters is fixed-price versus time-and-materials, because that determines who carries the risk when a project runs long.
How long does a custom software project take? +
Typically about four weeks from kick-off to a live, working product. Some are shorter. Larger scopes take longer. Four weeks is the rhythm we design to — long enough to build something properly, short enough to force honest decisions about scope.
Do I own the code? +
Yes. The repository is transferred to you on delivery. No licence we can revoke, no platform dependency, no hostage data. You can take it to any other developer, and some clients do. That is the point of ownership.
What happens if the project runs over? +
The price does not change. Fixed price means we carry the risk of a build taking longer than expected, which is precisely why we scope carefully first and decline vague briefs. If you genuinely change the scope mid-build, we requote that piece rather than absorbing it silently or arguing about it later.
Is bespoke software worth it versus off-the-shelf? +
Often not, and we will say so. If a product already does the job, buy it. Bespoke earns its cost when the process is specific to your industry, when the generic tool would force you to change how you work, when compliance requirements are too niche for the mass market, or when the thing you need simply does not exist.
Can you integrate with software I already use? +
Usually. Most builds can export structured data and accept structured input, and direct integrations with specific platforms can be scoped as part of the commission. The practical limit is whether the other system has a usable API — some UK trade platforms do not, and we will find that out during scoping rather than after.
Who maintains it after handover? +
Your choice. You own the code, so any developer can maintain it. Most clients come back to us because we know the system, but that is a preference rather than a dependency. We quote maintenance and changes the same way we quote builds.
Do you build mobile apps? +
We build progressive web apps rather than native iOS and Android apps. They install to the home screen, work offline, and access the camera and microphone — InspectVoice runs this way for site inspections with no signal. One codebase instead of three, which is a large part of why a build costs £8,500 rather than £85,000.
What if I only have a rough idea of what I need? +
That is normal and it is what the scoping session is for. What we cannot work with is a brief that stays vague after the session — at that point the honest answer is that the project is not ready, and we would rather say so than take a deposit against it.
Do you work with businesses outside the UK? +
Autaimate is UK-focused by design. Every build is shaped around UK regulations, UK language and UK pricing norms. Businesses with UK operations are welcome, but we do not localise for markets we do not know well. Specificity is the whole advantage.
How do I get started? +
Book a scoping session. Bring the process that is causing the problem rather than a solution you have already designed — the most useful sessions start from what actually happens, not from a specification.
Bring the process, not the specification.
The most useful scoping sessions start from what actually happens in your business. We will work out together whether something needs building.