MVP & Startups
What a first version costs, how long it takes, and how to scope one so the budget survives contact with reality.
Choosing a Tech Stack for Your MVP: A Decision Framework
A decision framework rather than a list of frameworks: how to weigh hiring pool, ecosystem maturity, reversibility and scaling headroom, plus sensible default stacks for five common product archetypes.
From Prototype to Production: What Breaks First
Auth, indexes, rate limits, uploads, backups and race conditions fail in a reliable sequence once real users arrive. Here is the order, and what each one costs you.
How Much Does It Cost to Build an MVP?
A cost breakdown for founders scoping their first build: what moves the number, what simple, moderate and complex MVPs go for on the open market, and why the lowest quote usually ends up the dearest.
In-House Team vs Agency vs Freelancers: The Real Cost Comparison
A three-way comparison of in-house hiring, agencies and freelancers on fully loaded cost, speed to start, retention risk and quality control — including the situations where each one is the wrong answer.
MVP Scoping Checklist: What to Prepare Before You Brief an Agency
Eleven things to have written down before your first agency call, and what a good agency actually does with each answer. Prepared briefs get narrower estimates and shorter builds.
MVP Timeline: What 8, 12 and 16 Weeks Actually Buy You
Three common timeboxes, and what each one honestly produces once you subtract the fixed overhead every build pays. Includes what gets cut first, and why adding people in week nine makes you later.
Automation & Internal Tools
Deciding what is worth automating, and whether to build it, buy it, or assemble it from something low-code.
AI Agents for Business Operations: What They Actually Automate
A working definition of an agent, the five operational jobs they do well, the ones they still do badly, and how to bound an agent’s authority so a wrong answer stays cheap.
Custom CRM vs Salesforce vs HubSpot: When Building Wins
Most companies should buy their CRM, and the ones that shouldn’t can usually name why in a sentence. Here are the five conditions under which a custom build beats a platform, and the arithmetic that settles it.
Integrating Legacy Systems With Modern SaaS
The realistic integration options when one side is a system you cannot change, ranked worst to best, with the anti-corruption layer, idempotency and reconciliation work nobody scopes for.
Internal Tools: Build, Buy or Low-Code?
A decision framework for internal tooling — where low-code genuinely wins, the specific points at which it stops working, and what it costs to move off it.
Off-the-Shelf vs Custom Software: A Total Cost Comparison
A five-year total cost of ownership model for the off-the-shelf vs custom software decision, with every assumption written out so you can substitute your own numbers.
What Does Business Process Automation Actually Cost?
A working method for pricing automation: what a process costs to run by hand, what it costs to build and maintain, and why the processes with the most exceptions are the ones that quietly eat the budget.
AI Engineering
Shipping AI features that hold up under real users — architecture, evaluation, and what they cost to run.
AI Agent Architecture: Patterns and Failure Modes
Five agent architecture patterns, the failure modes each one brings with it, and why most systems described as agents are better built as a fixed pipeline with one model call per step.
AI Product Development: From Demo to Dependable
The process for taking an AI product from a convincing demo to something a business can depend on — why the feasibility spike comes before the plan, and why data and interface decide the outcome more than the model does.
How to Evaluate an LLM Feature Before You Ship It
Evaluation is the discipline that separates teams shipping AI reliably from teams guessing. Here is how to build a golden dataset, choose scoring methods that catch real failures, and notice when a provider update quietly degrades your feature.
RAG vs Fine-Tuning vs Prompt Engineering: How to Choose
A decision framework for the three ways to change what a language model does. Most teams reach for fine-tuning when the real problem is missing context.
Shipping AI Features That Survive Production
The gap between a demo that impresses and a feature that holds up is not model quality. It is retry policy, schema validation, timeout budgets and knowing what the screen shows when the provider returns an error.
What It Costs to Run an LLM Feature in Production
The economics of shipping a language model feature: how token pricing really works, where the naive per-request estimate goes wrong, and how to build a cost ceiling before launch.
Legacy Modernisation
Replacing systems that still earn their keep, without the rewrite that never lands.
Cloud Cost Optimisation: Where the Money Actually Goes
A technical account of what a first cloud cost audit actually finds: over-provisioned instances, forgotten environments, cross-AZ traffic and logging spend, plus the structural levers that keep the bill down afterwards.
De-risking a Software Rewrite: A Pre-Migration Checklist
Nine artefacts to produce before the replacement project starts — captured behaviour, replayable traffic, an audited dataset, a tested rollback and an agreed kill date. Each one, and what skipping it costs you later.
How Much Does Legacy System Modernisation Cost?
Market ranges for each modernisation strategy, the cost drivers that actually move a number, and how to build a defensible estimate for a system nobody left understands.
Monolith to Microservices: When It Is Worth It
The unfashionable position, argued properly: most teams splitting a monolith should not, and the ones who should are usually fixing an organisational constraint rather than a technical one.
SOC 2, GDPR and HIPAA: What to Build In From Day One
What each regime asks of the software itself, as distinct from the paperwork — and the four architectural decisions that are nearly free before launch and painful for years afterwards.
Strangler Fig vs Big-Bang Rewrite: Choosing a Migration Path
The first architectural decision in any modernisation programme, made before a line of the new system exists. What each path commits you to, and how to run the incremental one properly.