The problem, as you feel it
There is a spreadsheet, or a set of them, that actually runs your business. Everyone knows which cells not to touch. Or there is an off-the-shelf system that does 70 percent of what you need, and the other 30 percent is done in email, on paper, and in someone’s head. Or your customers keep asking for a portal, a way to see their own status, and you keep saying “soon.”
You have priced custom software before. A quote came back in the tens of thousands with a six-month timeline and a lot of words about discovery phases. You kept the spreadsheet.
That pricing was honest for its time. Building software meant a team typing every line. It is not honest anymore.
What changed
A senior engineer working with AI coding agents now produces working, tested software at several times the pace of a few years ago. The agent writes the bulk of the code, the tests, and the documentation. The engineer decides what to build, how it should be structured, what to check, and what to reject, which is the part that always required experience and still does.
The result for a small business is that a focused internal tool or customer portal is a project measured in weeks, delivered at a fixed price, running on infrastructure that costs less per month than a phone plan. Not a prototype: a real application with logins, permissions, a database, backups, and someone accountable for it.
What I build most often for businesses your size:
- The spreadsheet, as an application. Same logic, but with rules enforced, a history of who changed what, multi-user access, and reports that do not break when someone sorts a column.
- Customer and vendor portals. Status, documents, invoices, requests, and messages, so customers stop calling to ask where things are.
- Operations tools. Scheduling, dispatch, inventory, inspections, job tracking, shaped to how you actually work instead of how a vendor assumed you do.
- Glue between systems when an integration does not exist and n8n is not enough.
- AI features inside your own tools. Document reading, drafting, classification, and search over your own records, built in where they help.
Take a business like this one
The business in this section is a composite of the kind of company I talk to, not a named client. The numbers are the shape of the problem, not a case study.
Picture a residential property management company: 340 units across sixty owners, seven staff. They use a mainstream property management system for accounting and leases. Everything else, maintenance requests, owner updates, vendor coordination, move-in inspections, runs through email, texts, a shared inbox, and a spreadsheet named FINAL-v7.
Owners call to ask about their properties. Tenants text maintenance requests to whichever staff member they have a number for. Vendors get work by phone and invoice by photo. The team spends, by their own estimate, a third of every day on status questions that a screen could answer.
What I set up for a business shaped like this:
- A tenant portal, phone-first, where a tenant submits a maintenance request with photos, sees its status, and gets notified when a vendor is scheduled. Requests are categorised and prioritised on arrival (an AI reads the description and photos), and emergencies page the on-call person.
- An owner portal showing each owner their units, open work, recent expenses, and a monthly summary, pulled from the property management system nightly so it never disagrees with the accounting.
- A vendor side where vendors accept jobs, upload the before-and-after photos, and submit the invoice against the job, so nothing arrives as a loose photo in a text.
- An inspection tool that replaces the paper move-in checklist with a guided phone form producing a signed PDF and a set of dated photos.
- Plumbing to the existing system, so leases and accounting stay where they are, and this application handles everything the vendor’s software never did.
Built by one senior engineer directing coding agents, a system like this is a matter of weeks, not a year, with the tenant portal live first because it removes the most phone calls. In a company shaped like this you should expect the status calls to fall away within a month of the portals going live, the maintenance backlog to become visible for the first time (which is uncomfortable, then useful), and owners to notice they are getting better information than they get from larger firms.
What it costs
Each project is quoted fixed-price from a written scope, after a conversation. Hosting for an application like the one above is tens of dollars a month. There is no per-seat license, you own the code, and it is written and documented so that any competent developer could take it over.
What I need from you
An hour to show me the spreadsheet, the inbox, and the workarounds, honestly. The three things that would make the biggest difference if a screen did them. Access to the systems the new tool has to talk to. Then a person on your team who will use the first version for a week and tell me what is wrong with it, because the first version is a conversation, not a delivery.