Custom Software Development

Cost tracks scope and complexity, so a credible number requires a conversation rather than a price list. The variables are how many user roles and workflows exist, how many integrations are needed, whether mobile applications are in scope, and how much compliance or security work the domain demands — a lending platform handling personal financial data is not comparable to an internal tool. We scope in phases and quote each phase, so you commit to a discovery and design phase, see real output, and decide on the build with far better information than you had at the start. That is deliberately structured to let you stop if we are not the right fit.

Yes, entirely. Source code and intellectual property transfer to you, and this is written into the contract rather than promised in a meeting. You receive the repositories, the infrastructure configuration and the documentation, and you may take them to another developer at any time without asking us. We think a client who stays because they are locked in is a client we did not earn. It is worth confirming this explicitly with any developer you engage, because retaining IP and licensing the result back is common practice in this market.

A focused first version typically reaches production in three to six months, with a usable increment considerably earlier — we would rather put something narrow into real users' hands in two months than deliver everything at once in twelve. Larger platforms with many integrations run longer, and we sequence them so that each phase delivers standalone value. Fixed all-or-nothing timelines over a year in length tend to describe projects that are already failing, because the requirements at the end will not be the requirements from the beginning.

Yes — it is one of the integrations we build most frequently. We work directly with the Safaricom Daraja API across STK Push for customer-initiated payments, C2B for paybill and till collections, B2C for disbursements and payouts, and transaction status and reversal queries. The parts that catch teams out are not the happy path: reliable callback handling, idempotency so a retried callback does not double-post a payment, reconciliation against invoices, and sandbox-to-production transition. We also integrate Pesalink, card gateways and bank feeds.

Frequently, yes. We begin with a paid technical audit of the existing codebase and infrastructure, because taking on an unknown system blind is unfair to both of us. That audit tells you honestly what you have: whether the foundation is sound and should be extended, whether specific components need rewriting, or whether the responsible recommendation is to rebuild — and we have said all three, including when rebuild was not what the client hoped to hear. If we take the project on, the audit findings become the roadmap.

Security is engineered in, which is the only way it is affordable. We run a secure development lifecycle: threat modelling during design, code review on every change, dependency and secret scanning in the CI pipeline, and a security review before launch conducted by the same team that runs our penetration tests for other clients. This matters more than it sounds — the flaws that penetration tests find in software built by generalist agencies are overwhelmingly design decisions taken early, when fixing them was nearly free, and discovered late, when it is not.