We design and develop professional quality, easy-to-use apps for UK businesses to help them engage customers, grow sales and increase efficiency.
We can help you clarify your most successful app ideas and then and implement them. And after that, keep everything running smoothly.
Typically 1-2 weeks
We'll guide you through turning your ideas into a roadmap with a sensible budget and timeline.
Typically 2-4 weeks
Save time and money by researching, designing and testing your ideas before building them for real.
Typically 2-6 months
This is where the ideas and concepts get turned into something you can put into the hands of your customers or staff.
For all you CTO's, CDO's and technical folks... We're a full-stack digital team who focus mostly on software platforms where mobile is hugely important to the success of the business.
When creating any digital product, we use a combination of design-thinking and agile delivery. This is because we believe these globally accepted best practices give you the best shot of creating a product that actually gets results.
Unlike many software houses, we adhere to the core principles of agile set out in the agile manifesto, which encourages collaboration, flexible project planning and doing the simplest thing that works.
We recommend native apps because they're the gold standard for a slick user experience. This means we use Java and Swift. We're also using Google Flutter for cross platform apps, but the jury is still out on this. We underpin our apps with just enough unit tests to give us confidence we don't break things when we refactor. We use Git Flow for managing branches and releases in different environments.
We prefer ReactJS for any non-trivial front-end web sites, admin portals and data dashboards. Underpinned by Elixir + Phoenix on the server side. We also have a lot of Ruby on Rails experience. We plan for scalability and security as appropriate, not being fans of premature optimisation.
We have data expertise in-house, working on some high-scale solutions capturing millions or records a day. Postgres is our current favourite SQL DB, scaled vertically with a replica for read-heavy use cases. We have experience with CouchDB for distributed databases. For integrating web sites to apps, we like RESTful API's with appropriate caching mechanisms, and are also exploring GraphQL.
Great! Arrange a meeting to get the ball rolling.
We do a little more than that. When working with us, you have a full digital product team at your disposal. This means we can help you build a complete solution including web sites, progressive web apps, portals, dashboards and of course, mobile apps. We also have experience in databases, analytics and connecting systems together using API's and integrations.
The most exciting opportunity is around how customer habits are changing, particularly with their use of mobile apps. There's an opportunity to observe customer behaviours and then design mobile experiences that engage with them, create loyalty and drive sales. Of course, this advice depends on who you and your customers are. We can give examples when we meet, but we'd encourage you to look at our "perspectives" section.
Yes, as long as it's mutual. We speak to many companies and hear dozens of ideas every year, so we will warn you if there is overlap. If needed, help yourself to our mutual NDA :)
One of our values is to "always be useful" for our clients. So, despite the first few meetings being FREE, we'll be doing work that provides value to you. After those first few meetings, we ask you to embark on a low risk £5K-£10K discovery phase that involves research, analysis and concept design.
We work on a fixed price, variable scope basis. This means we agree a sensible budget-cap, and allocate a team to your project each week at an agreed rate. We only charge for work done, and if you have budget left over at the end you can invest it in more features or we can give it back to you. You're probably wondering what happens if we go over budget? We continually run project budget projections, so in the rare case that this happens we will notify you well in advance, and then we can discuss ways of mitigating that risk.
Yes. Before you decide to partner with us, we give you an illustrative estimate based on your initial ideas. You can use this to see if we're competitive. Then, after the fixed-cost discovery phase where we refine the ideas and research unknowns, we will revise that estimate.
The most important thing to us is to see our work out there in the wild being of value to you and your customers. We consider investments where it's likely that the long-term success of the venture requires a vested technical team. Typically, we'd consider investment after the first iteration is complete and we have some real data to work with.
Yes, if you're like many of our clients, you'll be creating a app mobile to generate revenue or improve your business operations, so it's important your app remains online at all times. This includes making sure that things don't break when Apple or Google update their operating systems. Our most basic packages are £550 a month. For those that need it, we also have 24/7/365 support packages covering server infrastructure and apps ranging from £3,000 to £7,000 a month, depending on the size, scale and transactional volume of your solution.
Our contract grants you ownerships of things we create for you, as long as they are paid for. We assign copyright to you on request. You have access to any plans, strategy documents, source code and designs we create.
Yes. If you have an in-house team we often will work with you to blend our resources to create a single project team. The Pocketworks team work from our Leeds offices, although we are happy to arrange a weekly collaborative session at your site or ours.
Yes, some of our clients are growing their own technology teams and want us to hand-over at some point. We can support this, offering training and growing your internal capabilities.
The discovery phase involves collaborative workshops, research and visualising ideas. If you're worried this might be a bit "fluffy", please be assured that our discoveries are lean, and focus on things that will directly influence the success of your project. This might include auditing your IT so we can check feasibility, gaining an understanding of who will be using your app so you only invest in the right platforms and features, and visualising ideas so you can build confidence in the direction you're taking.
No. If your application is hosted on a server in the cloud, you pay the raw cost without us marking them up. Hosting is incredibly low-cost these days, so you can benefit from that. If we are involved in looking after your servers and uptime, we can agree a support contract.
Yes. Some of our clients spread their app investment over the year at a fixed monthly fee. This is often combined with a support contract. The nice thing about this is that, if you don't need much support one month, a chunk of it goes in the "pot" so can be used for feature development. This means you get the most cost-effective support possible and all the benefits of continuous improvement to your product.
You may have noticed that we create apps and web platforms for many hardware manufacturers. We're experienced in creating apps for both industrial IoT and consumer IoT. This often means dealing with large quantities of sensor data, handling device connectivity and building gateway products. We can talk about this specialty if it's of interest to you.
