Most organisations reach a point where their software shapes their process rather than the other way round. Devika builds custom software around how your business actually operates, on infrastructure you own.
Enterprise work. A Devika-built dashboard, from the enterprise portfolio.
See Our Work →We will talk you out of custom software when off-the-shelf is the right answer. That happens more often than you would expect from a development company.
Your process is genuinely standard, the licence cost is predictable, and the vendor’s roadmap is heading where you are heading. Payroll, general accounting and CRM are usually solved problems. Rebuilding them is expensive theatre.
Buy commodity. Build advantage. Never the other way round.
Custom software solutions earn their cost when the standard product is the thing getting in the way. In practice that means one or more of the following is true.
Two words that appear on every proposal. Here is the substance.
Serverless means you rent the compute by the second instead of renting the server by the month. If your system is busy in bursts, that cost line nearly disappears. If it runs flat out all day, it will not.
Scalable custom software solutions handle 10 times the load without a rebuild and, the part usually left out, cost roughly proportionally when they are not under load. Traditional architecture bills you for capacity whether you use it or not. Serverless architecture bills for what you consume.
The difference is not theoretical. When we rebuilt Circolo on serverless infrastructure, their monthly AWS bill for compute, storage and data transfer fell from over $2,000 to under $1, because an events platform sits idle most of the month and they had been paying for peak capacity continuously. Reliability and performance improved at the same time. Your own saving depends entirely on your usage pattern, and a system under constant load will see far less.
Security in practice means encryption in transit and at rest, role-based access so people see only what their job requires, audit logging, dependency patching, and infrastructure managed under AWS shared responsibility and its compliance programs. We test against the OWASP Top 10 and can arrange independent penetration testing on request.
We are 100 per cent onshore, which matters when data residency is a board-level question. Data stays in Australian AWS regions unless you direct otherwise, and no engineer outside Australia touches your systems.
Ask us for our current certification and insurance position before you go to contract. We would rather tell you exactly what we hold than imply more than we do.
Enterprise software has a reputation for 18-month programs that deliver something already obsolete. That reputation is earned, and it is avoidable.
We work in short sprints with working software at the end of each one. You see progress in weeks, not at a launch date. Scope adjusts as reality intrudes, which it always does.
Scheduling, dispatch, inventory and compliance workflows
Matching, payments, settlement and dispute handling
Self-service that reduces support load
APIs and middleware that make existing systems cooperate, including ERP connections
One number, one source, one definition
Replacing systems that work but cannot change
We map the current workflow including the workarounds, because the workarounds are where the requirements are hiding. A solution architect owns the technical shape. The output is a scoped roadmap with sequencing and cost.
For business systems, Baseline contributes the things every platform needs and no user ever praises: authentication and single sign-on, role and permission management, audit logging, payments and an admin console. On a typical enterprise build that is 8 to 12 weeks of work you do not fund twice.
Two-week cycles, working software each time, and direct access to the people building it.
Phased rollout, monitoring, and a team that stays available through support and maintenance.
Two-week cycles. Working software every fortnight. You never wait six months to find out it is wrong.
Serverless AWS by default, with containers where workload shape warrants it. Infrastructure defined as code so environments are reproducible.
Automated unit, integration and end-to-end coverage on critical paths, with test results gating deployment.
CI/CD with staged environments, automated rollback and no manual production deploys.
Architecture decision records, API documentation, environment runbooks and a written handover pack. You should be able to move the system to another team without our cooperation.
Every engagement has at least two engineers familiar with the codebase, and repository and infrastructure access sits with you from day one.
This is the first question most finance teams ask, and it deserves a direct answer rather than a slogan.
Offshore development will beat our hourly rate, often by half. What the rate card does not price is the specification detail required to brief across a timezone gap, the rework when that detail proves insufficient, the review overhead on your side, and the practical difficulty of enforcing anything across jurisdictions if a project goes wrong.
Our engineers are Australian employees in your timezone who join your standups and speak to your staff directly. On a complex build with changing requirements, the total delivered cost is usually far closer than the rates suggest, and the variance is much lower.
If your project is genuinely well-specified, stable in scope and low on integration risk, offshore may be the better commercial answer. We will tell you when we think that is the case.
In 2021 Devika worked alongside Volt Bank’s technology leadership to consolidate core banking services across web and native mobile, front end and back end, over a 3-month engagement. Volt was one of Australia’s first licensed neobanks. It closed its deposit-taking business in June 2022 and returned its banking licence to APRA in September 2022 after being unable to raise further capital. We include the work here because the engineering standard it was delivered to still represents how we work in regulated environments.
“We had to pick and choose the firms we want to partner with very selectively. Selecting Ken and the Devika team was a great decision.”
An event company arrived with a platform that was unreliable, expensive to run and difficult to extend. Devika rebuilt it as a cloud-native application on Baseline and AWS in 3 months, delivering role-based access, live runsheets, budget tracking and Stripe-backed monetisation, and cutting infrastructure cost by more than 99 per cent in the process.
“They challenge us in constructive ways and truly feel like part of our team.”
A shipping platform aggregating multiple carriers into one dashboard, with rate comparison, bulk label generation, real-time Shopify fulfilment sync, and an integration-ready API layer built for Amazon, eBay and ERP connections still to come. 3.5 months, now generating commercial revenue.
Read the Case Study →Discovery. We will map your workflow and, if a configured off-the-shelf product does the job, we will say so. It is a shorter conversation but a better one.
It varies enormously with scope. The number that matters is total cost of ownership: build plus running costs, set against your current licence fees plus the staff hours absorbed by workarounds. After discovery we quote a fixed band with the assumptions documented, so you can compare proposals on the same basis.
Working software within the first few sprints. Full delivery for a substantial platform typically runs 3 to 6 months.
You own the application code, the data and the infrastructure outright on completion. The Baseline components underneath it are licensed to you perpetually, irrevocably and royalty-free, with no ongoing fee and no restriction on modifying, extending or selling the product built on them. We use the same wording on every engagement so your procurement team is not comparing two different promises.
Fixed-scope phases with agreed milestones, a defect warranty period after each release, professional indemnity and public liability cover, and a documented exit and handover process. We will send the standard terms before the second meeting rather than at contract stage.
Yes. Integration is usually the majority of the work in custom software for established businesses.
Yes. Most clients move into an ongoing arrangement at launch, covered by our support and maintenance service.
We will tell you what it would take to fix it, and whether it is worth fixing.
