01The work
Most products fit everyone a little. This fits you exactly.
Most software you can buy is built to serve thousands of businesses at once, which is why it never quite matches yours.
- Built to fit one business
- A product has to serve thousands of customers at once, so it fits none of them exactly. Software written for one business matches how that business runs, down to the words on the buttons.
- Yours when it is done
- You get the code. There is no seat count, no plan tier and no feature held back for an upgrade, and nobody can change the terms on you later.
- Small enough to be worth doing
- A spreadsheet that has outgrown itself, a report nobody has time to assemble, a tool your team would open every day. Work too specific for a vendor to take on.
02How it goes
Just four steps.
- 01
We talk about the work
You tell me what the software has to do. If you can buy something that already does it, I will say so.
- 02
You get a quote
One fee to build it, and a separate price to host it if you want me to. Both are fixed before I start.
- 03
I build it
You see it working early, and say what is wrong while changing it is still cheap.
- 04
I hand it over
You get the code, the accounts and the instructions for running it. Nothing is held back.
03What it costs
A fee for the work, and hosting only if you want it.
Nothing here is a price list. Both are quoted before the work starts.
By here the subscription has cost more.
The fee is the step on the first day, and hosting is the small slope after it. A subscription starts at nothing and never levels off.
- Building it By quote
- One fee for the work, agreed before I start. A change of scope gets its own quote rather than appearing on an invoice.
- Hosting By quote, optional
- Only if the software needs a server and you would rather not run it yourself. You can move it elsewhere whenever you want.
- Keeping it Nothing
- Nothing recurs unless I am running a server for you.
04Work
What this looks like when it is finished.
Client work is mostly private, so the two case studies below are my own tools.
Built for
- Myself
- Being my own first user is how I find out whether the handover holds.
- A friend
- One person has one problem that no vendor is ever going to build for.
- A local business
- A shop, a studio or a practice already does the work by hand every week.
Case study
A calorie counter that stays on the phone
You type what you ate in plain English and it answers with the calories and the macro split. Nothing you log leaves the device, and the only thing that reaches the estimation API is the phrase being estimated. The day reads as a radial ring and the quarter as a trend chart.
calcifer.brickberry.io- Built for
- Myself
- Runs on
- Any phone browser
- Data
- On the device
- Accounts
- None
- Recurring cost
- The estimation API
Case study
A budgeting app for one household
Bank transactions sync in, land in a database on the phone, and the month’s reports are computed there. It installs on the devices that need it rather than shipping to an app store, and there is no subscription because there is nobody to subscribe to.
- Built for
- Myself
- Runs on
- iOS and Android
- Stack
- SvelteKit, Capacitor, Hono, SQLite
- Integrations
- Plaid for bank sync
- Recurring cost
- One small server
05Who you are hiring
Jon Staab, and fifteen years of shipping software.
- I maintain what I ship
- I have shipped and maintained production systems for more than fifteen years, and I still maintain the ones listed above. You are hiring an engineer who will read your problem and argue with it, and who will sometimes tell you not to build the thing.
- AI makes me faster, not qualified
- I use it the way I use a compiler, to reach the work sooner. Every design decision, every line that touches your data and everything I hand over is mine, and I can explain all of it.
06Get in touch
Tell me what the software has to do.
Half an hour on a call is enough for me to say whether this is worth building, what it would take, and whether you should buy something instead.