Custom software development company: Custom software, from a team that runs its own.

What we built for ourselves

We would rather show you systems you can open in your browser than screenshots of confidential client work. Here is what they do, and where each one stands.

Zeniva Travel is an online travel agency serving US clients: search and booking, an advisor workspace, and Lina, a conversational assistant built on top of commercial language models and connected to travel content APIs. When one model provider goes down, Lina fails over to the next automatically, and influencer commissions are calculated server-side.

ZeniPay is a fintech platform: merchant onboarding, invoicing, payouts, and an append-only ledger where the database itself refuses to edit or delete an entry. Every payment carries an idempotency key so it is never processed twice, and the audit log exports as a signed file an auditor can verify offline. The payment processor connections are still in test mode, and automated commission splitting is not built yet: today it is done by hand. We say so because a technical buyer would ask.

ZeniCorp is a construction and renovation platform in Quebec: the client describes the job online, the request is stored with a fallback path so none is lost, contractors who sign up have their RBQ licence checked by the team, and the published model has 30% of the contract paid at signing and 70% passed to the contractor.

Build or buy: how we decide

Most of the time, the right answer is to buy. Accounting, payroll, email and video calls are solved problems; rebuilding them means paying to reinvent what already exists.

Custom software is justified in three specific cases. When the way you work is what sets you apart, and off-the-shelf software forces you to give it up. When per-seat subscriptions grow with every hire, to the point where two or three years of licences would pay for the build. And when your team spends its days copying data between tools that do not talk to each other.

We run the numbers with you during the free call and tell you when the answer is to buy. The full reasoning, with Quebec market prices and the three-year break-even, is in our French-language guide.

Four rules that keep custom software from becoming a trap

Custom software goes wrong in predictable ways: the client does not own the code, nobody else can take it over, the budget has no ceiling, or six months in you discover the wrong thing was built. Each rule answers one of those risks.

• The repository is in your name from the first commit, in your own account. We are invited collaborators; you can remove us at any time.
• A standard stack, no in-house framework: Next.js, Node.js, PostgreSQL. Any competent developer can take the project over without us.
• Written documentation and a recorded walkthrough at every delivery, not only at the end.
• Delivery in phases, each at a fixed price written before it starts and usable when it ships. You can stop after any of them.

What we most often build for clients

Rarely a whole product. Almost always the missing piece between tools that already exist, or the core of a business the market does not serve well.

• Client and partner portals with roles and permissions
• Internal tools that replace the spreadsheet three people fight over
• Integrations between accounting, CRM, website and payments
• Multi-party platforms: clients, suppliers, commissions and payouts

Frequently asked questions

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