When custom software is worth it
Many companies run on software that officially does not exist: a grown landscape of Excel files, mailing lists and knowledge that lives in people's heads. It works until a key person is away or the volume grows. Custom software pays off exactly where your process deviates from the standard — and where that deviation is your business.
We do not recommend building your own by reflex. Where standard software or an extension will do, we say so. Only when the comparison between your requirements and what the market offers shows a real gap is your own code worth the money.
Customer portals, internal tools, automation
We build a customer portal for what it is: the digital extension of your order processing. Your customers see orders, documents and progress without anyone in sales having to write an email. The data comes out of your existing systems — through an interface, not by copy and paste.
We build internal tools where recurring routines eat time: approvals, reporting, data maintenance. An Excel process with three people and twelve file versions becomes an application with clear states, permissions and a history you can follow.
Modernising legacy software
Plenty of line-of-business applications run on Zend Framework or early Laminas versions — valuable in what they do, stuck in how they are built. We know this kind of code base from our own work and modernise it step by step: PHP version and dependencies first, then the architecture, then the features.
A big-bang rewrite is rarely the right answer. Instead we replace modules one at a time while the old application keeps running. The system stays in production and the risk spreads across manageable steps instead of landing on a single date.
Code that belongs to you
PHP development is not a side discipline here, it is the core of what we do. As a Symfony agency we work with a deliberately unspectacular stack: PHP 8, Symfony, MariaDB, Redis, Docker — open, documented, established. Any experienced PHP agency could take your application over. We work on making sure you never want to.
“Ready to hand over” is not a label here, it is the state the work is kept in. You get the complete source code, technical documentation and automated tests that pin down how the application behaves. Planning, build and operation stay with one team in Oldenburg. Vendor lock-in is a business model — it is not ours.