Services - Custom internal tools development, without hiring for it.
Your team is running the business on spreadsheets, manual SQL, and a Retool board nobody trusts. Custom internal tools development is rarely anyone's priority to hire for, so it never gets built. This is one senior, founder-led engineer who builds the admin panels, dashboards, and internal apps your team actually needs, one priority at a time, and ships them into your stack week by week.
Plans tailored to the build
One senior engineer, one priority at a time
One senior, founder-led engineer takes this build week by week and ships production-ready code as pull requests you review and merge. Time and cost vary by plan and scope, and we’ll cover both before you start.
What's included
- Admin panels and back-office tools: the CRUD screens, search, filters, and bulk actions your ops, support, and finance teams need to stop running raw SQL against production.
- Internal dashboards that pull from your real data — orders, users, usage, revenue — so the team stops rebuilding the same spreadsheet every week.
- Role-based access so support, ops, and admins each see and do only what they should, with an audit trail on the actions that matter.
- Workflow and automation tools: the internal app that replaces a manual, error-prone process — approvals, data entry, exports, reconciliations — with something reliable.
- Integrations into the systems your team already lives in: your database, Stripe, your APIs, and third-party tools, wired together instead of copied between tabs by hand.
- Tools built into your own codebase and stack where it matters, so they're not trapped behind a no-code vendor's limits and per-seat pricing.
How we build it, week by week
One priority at a time, shipped in reviewable increments you merge as they land — not one big drop at the end.
Week 1 — find the most expensive manual task
We look at where your team burns the most time or makes the most mistakes, scope the tool that removes it, and stand up the internal app skeleton with auth and roles.
Weeks 2–3 — the tool your team uses daily
The admin screens, dashboards, or workflow app built against your real data and merged as PRs. Your team is clicking a working tool by the end of each week.
Weeks 3–4 — roles, audit, and integrations
Permissions so each team sees the right thing, an audit trail on sensitive actions, and the integrations that connect the tool to Stripe, your APIs, and the systems you already run on.
Ongoing — the next bottleneck
Every internal tool exposes the next manual thing worth automating. Those become the next priorities on the board, shipped weekly for as long as it's worth it — pause when the backlog clears.
Stack
- Next.js / React
- Node / Express
- PostgreSQL
- Auth.js
- Your existing APIs
- Stripe / third-party integrations
Is this the right build for you?
A good fit when
- Your team is losing real time to spreadsheets, manual SQL, or copy-paste between systems, and nobody has bandwidth to build the tool.
- You want custom internal tools in your own stack, owned by a senior engineer, not another no-code board with per-seat pricing and limits you'll hit.
- You'd rather pay a flat monthly you can pause than hire a full-time engineer for work that comes in bursts.
Not a fit when
- An off-the-shelf tool already does the job well — buy it.
- You need a large internal platform team building many systems in parallel — that's a bigger org, not one engineer.
- The process isn't settled yet; if it changes weekly, a tool will just chase it — nail the process first, then automate it.
Builds like this
Real month-plus builds you can read end to end, delivered on the same subscription.
Why on a subscription
Internal tools come in bursts: one quarter ops needs three tools, the next it's quiet. A flexible monthly plan you can pause gives you a senior engineer exactly when the backlog is there and costs nothing when it clears — instead of a full-time hire idling between projects or a no-code vendor's bill that only grows.
Frequently asked questions
- Why not just use Retool or a no-code tool?
- For a quick throwaway, use them. But teams outgrow no-code tools fast: per-seat pricing climbs, complex logic gets awkward, and you can't take the tool with you. We build into your own codebase and stack, so the tool is yours, integrates deeply with your data, and doesn't cost more every time you add a user. If a no-code tool genuinely fits, we'll say so.
- Can you work with our production database safely?
- Yes, carefully. Internal tools scope access by role, put an audit trail on sensitive actions, and use safe, reviewed queries instead of letting anyone run raw SQL against prod. Everything ships as PRs you review before it touches real data.
- How fast can you build one tool?
- A focused internal tool — an admin panel or a dashboard — often comes together in a week or two of active work, shipped as PRs you review. Larger internal apps move in the same priority order, cycle by cycle. You always see the board, so you know what's landing this week.
- Do we own the tools?
- Fully. They live in your repo, in your stack, with no proprietary wrapper or vendor lock-in. When the subscription ends, the tools keep running and your team keeps using them.
Got a project? Let's ship it.
3 spots open. Tell us what you need shipped. We’ll match the plan and timeline to the work on a short sales call, then deliver it in reviewable increments.