Custom Software Development

Software Development Services:
Web Apps, SaaS & AI Tools We Run Ourselves

Builds start at $10,000. An MVP ships in 4 to 8 weeks, and a full SaaS platform with billing, roles, and integrations runs $50,000 or more. The price is up here instead of buried at the bottom, because a $10,000 floor should qualify you in or out before you read anything else. We run three systems of our own on this stack: RankNest, the SEO platform our client campaigns live in, the client hub this agency operates on, and the site you are reading.

Builds From $10,000
MVPs in 4 to 8 Weeks
You Own the Code
Principal-Led, No Handoff
Get Your Software Project QuoteSchedule Free Consultation

What We Build

If it runs in a browser and talks to a database, we build it. These are the shapes most projects take.

Custom Web Applications
Full-stack apps with auth, roles, and admin dashboards

Booking systems, quoting tools, review workflows, anything your business runs on that a template cannot handle. Built with server rendering so pages load fast and rank in search.

SaaS Products
From MVP to a platform customers pay for monthly

Multi-tenant architecture, subscriptions, onboarding, and usage tracking. RankNest is ours and it is built this way: every client account's crawl data, link maps, and experiments are separated at the database level, not by an if-statement somebody has to remember to write.

Client Portals & Internal Tools
Replace the spreadsheet that runs your business

Dashboards, project trackers, and portals where your customers log in to see their files, invoices, and progress. We never bought a CRM. The client hub we built runs this agency: synced email, searchable documents, every project and task against the right client.

AI Features & Agents
Claude and OpenAI models doing real work, with human review

Document search with embeddings, email classification, and agents that propose an action and wait for a human to approve it. Ours triages our inbox and files each message against the right client. Agents that write to live data unattended are not a feature we sell.

API Integrations
Make the tools you already pay for talk to each other

Payment processors, Google APIs, CRMs, email platforms, and flight or inventory data feeds. We handle OAuth, webhooks, rate limits, and the retry logic that keeps integrations from silently breaking.

Background Jobs & Automation
Work that happens on schedule without anyone clicking

Scheduled syncs, report generation, data pipelines, and queued processing that retries itself when an upstream API has a bad morning. The unglamorous layer that separates software you babysit from software that runs itself.

The Stack, and Why Each Piece Is There

The same stack on every project, including this website. No experiments on your dime and no orphaned technology nobody else can maintain. Every choice below is an argument we are willing to have.

Front End
  • Next.js and React, rendered on the server. Pages arrive as HTML. An app that needs JavaScript to say anything is an app Google reads as a blank page.
  • TypeScript end to end. Rename a database column and the build breaks in front of us, not the checkout in front of your customer.
  • Tailwind for styling. The styles sit next to the markup, so the next developer changes a screen without excavating a stylesheet nobody documented.
  • Radix UI for interactive parts. Focus traps, keyboard behaviour, and screen reader semantics are solved problems. We do not rewrite a dropdown badly to prove a point.
Back End & Data
  • PostgreSQL with row-level security. Who can read a row is enforced by the database, not by a check in each API route. App-layer rules only protect the routes someone remembered to guard, and the leak is always the route nobody remembered.
  • Supabase for auth, storage, and realtime. We refuse to hand-roll authentication. Sessions, password resets, and OAuth are where small teams ship the bug that ends up in the news.
  • Queued background jobs, not cron. Jobs retry, back off, and leave a run history you can open. A cron entry that dies at 3am dies silently, and you find out from a customer.
  • Migrations in version control. Schema changes are reviewable files with an order, so staging and production do not quietly drift apart.
AI & Search
  • Claude for reasoning, OpenAI for embeddings. Chosen per job. Model loyalty is not an engineering position.
  • Semantic search over your own documents. Keyword search fails the moment someone searches for the idea instead of the exact word in the file.
  • Agents propose, humans approve. Every action is logged with the run that produced it, so an odd decision can be traced instead of argued about.
Hosting & Delivery
  • Vercel, with instant rollback. A bad release goes back to the last good one in seconds, so shipping on a Friday is not a gamble.
  • A preview URL for every change. You approve the actual thing on a real URL. Nobody signs off on a screenshot.
  • Resend for transactional email. When a customer says the receipt never arrived, there is a delivery log that settles it.

How a Project Runs

Six stages. A written scope and a fixed quote range before anything is built, and a staging URL from week one.

1
Discovery

We map the workflow, the data it touches, and who is allowed to see what. You leave with a written scope, a sketch of the data model, and a fixed quote range.

2
Architecture

Schema, permissions, and integrations get decided before a single screen exists. A wrong permission model is expensive to undo. A wrong button colour is not.

3
Design

Clickable designs for the screens people will live in. You use them and correct course while a change still costs an afternoon instead of a sprint.

4
Build

Weekly increments on a staging URL you can open at any hour. You watch features land instead of waiting for a reveal at the end.

5
Launch

Production deploy, migration of the records you already have, and training for the people who will use this every day, not just the person who signed.

6
Iterate

What people actually use decides what gets built next. Small releases, not a rewrite once a year.

Software We Own and Run

Most agencies pay a monthly bill for the software they work in. We wrote ours. RankNest runs our client SEO, the client hub runs the agency, and this website runs on the same stack we would build yours on. We are the on-call for all three, which is why we can tell you what actually breaks in production instead of what a case study says.

Our SaaS Product
RankNest
The SEO platform our client campaigns run in.

Multi-tenant from day one: it crawls client sites, runs technical audits, builds internal link maps, and tracks SEO experiments against Google Search Console data, with every account's data separated in Postgres. AI agents do the analysis that used to cost hours per site. When it breaks at 6am there is no vendor to escalate to. That is the difference between owning the software you work in and renting it.

See how we use it on client SEO
Our Client System
Grindstone Client Hub
The CRM we run this agency on.

Gmail syncs into a shared inbox, an AI agent classifies each message and files it against the right client, project, and task, and contracts and briefs are chunked and embedded so an old document is one search away. Row-level security scopes each client's portal to that client. It is the same architecture we would build your portal on, and we onboarded ourselves onto it before we ever sold it.

See our work
Our Marketing Site
This Website
The build you can inspect right now.

Every blog post, portfolio project, service area, and redirect is a database row edited through an admin we wrote, not a file we redeploy. Two gates run before it ships: a WCAG 2.1 AA scan across all 45 public routes that fails on a single violation, and a check that fails the build if any button on a public page renders without a destination. Both exist because both caught real bugs.

See how we build sites

Why Build With Grindstone

We are our own hardest user

RankNest and the client hub are products we depend on to get paid, not portfolio pieces we shipped and forgot. We hit every slow query and every confusing screen ourselves, months before your users would. A shop that only builds for clients never has to live with its own decisions.

The person who scopes it writes it

James Price designs the interface and the database schema in the same week, because they are the same decision. You get no account manager relaying messages and no junior inheriting the file after you sign. When a build needs a second pair of hands we bring in a contractor and tell you who they are.

Built to be found

We are an SEO agency too, so applications we build render on the server, ship structured data, and pass an automated WCAG 2.1 AA scan before release. This website holds zero violations across 45 public routes, and the scan errors out the moment that stops being true.

No lock-in

The repository, the database, and every service account are in your name from day one, not transferred at the end if things go well. Hire someone in-house later and they inherit typed, documented code on a stack they can recruit for.

Software Development Questions, Answered

Tell Us What It Has to Do

Describe the workflow that is currently held together by a spreadsheet and three people remembering things. We scope it, quote a fixed range before any code is written, and tell you if a $50 per month tool already does the job. Builds start at $10,000.

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(512) 200-3927
Case Studies

Software Projects

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