Bespoke software · IT consulting
Off-the-shelf software makes you work its way. We build the system that works your way — designed around how your business actually runs, engineered to last, and supported by the people who wrote it.
Platforms & technologies we work with
Services
We're the technical partner for companies that need more than a website and less than a 40-person department. Strategy, build, run — or any one of them.
Line-of-business systems, internal platforms, customer portals and operational tooling — built to your process instead of forcing you into someone else's. Web, desktop, mobile and API.
Your ERP, CRM, accounting package and that critical spreadsheet should talk to each other. We make them, with integrations that are observable, resilient and boring in the best way.
Infrastructure you can reason about. Containerised deployments, automated pipelines, sensible monitoring and a recovery plan you've actually tested.
One version of the truth. We consolidate scattered data into models you can trust, then surface it as dashboards and reports your team will genuinely use.
Independent, senior advice with no product to sell you. Technical due diligence, architecture reviews, build-vs-buy calls and roadmaps that survive contact with a budget.
Inherited something fragile? We stabilise first, then modernise in safe increments — no big-bang rewrite, no six months of silence.
Approach
Software projects rarely fail for technical reasons. They fail because nobody agreed what "done" meant. Our process exists to remove that risk.
We sit with the people who do the work. We map the process, find the real bottleneck, and tell you honestly if software isn't the answer.
A written scope with phases, prices and a definition of done. You see clickable designs before we write production code — changes are cheap here, expensive later.
Short iterations with working software at the end of each. Automated tests, code review and a staging environment you can log into any day of the week.
We deploy it, monitor it, document it and hand over the keys. Stay on a support agreement or take it fully in-house — the source is yours either way.
Work
A sample of the work we do. Client names on request — most of what we build runs behind the scenes.
Operations platform
A field-services business ran scheduling, quoting and compliance across a shared drive. We built a single web platform with role-based access, offline capture on site and automated invoicing into their accounting package.
Result — quote turnaround cut from days to hours, and month-end reconciliation from a week to an afternoon.
Integration
Orders arrived in one system, stock lived in another and finance saw neither until month-end. We built an event-driven integration layer with retries, dead-letter handling and a dashboard showing exactly what moved where.
Result — manual re-keying eliminated, and stock accuracy visible in real time.
Modernisation
A decade-old application nobody dared touch, on an unsupported runtime. We wrapped it in tests, containerised it, moved it to modern hosting, then replaced it module by module while it stayed live.
Result — zero unplanned downtime through the migration, and a codebase a new developer can pick up.
Data
Three departments, three different revenue figures. We modelled the data properly, built a warehouse with documented definitions, and put self-serve dashboards in front of the leadership team.
Result — reporting effort down dramatically, and arguments about whose number is right, over.
About
Frontforge exists because good software shouldn't require a nine-month discovery phase and a project manager per developer. We're deliberately small, deliberately senior, and we stay with what we build.
You'll talk to the engineers doing the work. Decisions get made in the same conversation they're raised in. And when something breaks at an inconvenient hour, you're not opening a ticket into a void — you're messaging the person who knows the system.
Talk to an engineerNo jargon used to justify a rate. If we can't explain it simply, we don't understand it well enough yet.
You get the source, the infrastructure and the documentation. Staying with us should be a choice, not a hostage situation.
We'll tell you when a cheaper option exists, and when your idea needs another month of thinking before a line of code.
Tested, documented, conventional. The highest compliment our code gets is that the next developer found it obvious.
Contact
Tell us the problem — not the solution you think you need. First conversation is free, and you'll leave it with a straight answer either way.