Custom software · North East England
The software your business actually needs was always too expensive to build. It isn’t now.
So, like every small business, you bought tools built for everyone and paid people to work around them. Stoic Software builds systems shaped around how your business really works — then runs them for you. It starts with a day inside your business, and a £1,000 audit you can click through.
01The problem
You already know where the hours go.
The software you pay for every month still needs a person to run it — retyping, chasing, patching the gaps between what it does and what you do.
The systems you’ve tried before were built for a thousand businesses at once. They fit yours roughly — and roughly is expensive.
Too much of the business lives in one person’s head. Everyone knows it, and nobody has had time to fix it.
None of this is your team’s fault. The real fix — software built around the business — has always been priced for corporates. Nobody your size ever got it.
02What changed
The senior consultant, without the team behind him.
Custom software used to mean an agency team — a project manager, designers, developers, testers, each billed at £500–£750 a day, for months. That arithmetic is why nobody ever built it for small businesses.
Stoic works differently, and we’ll tell you exactly how: AI agents write the software. Mark — a consultant who has built systems for banks, brokers and businesses for almost thirty years — supervises them the way he used to supervise a team. He approves every plan. He clicks through every change before it ships. In his words: “it replaces the team I would usually have had build it.”
The craft didn’t get cheaper. The labour did. You get the senior consultant’s attention on your business; the agents do the typing.
That’s the whole trick — and it’s why a premium consultation service is suddenly affordable to businesses the big consultancies never bothered with.
03How it works
It starts with a day inside your business.
Not a sales call. A working day, on site: the morning with you, on where the hours and the money actually go; a look through the systems, spreadsheets and procedures you run on today — including what you pay for each piece of software, and what it actually does for you; and most of the day with the people doing the actual work, because they know where the real bottlenecks are. The map of how your business really runs is drawn with the people who run it.
Agencies arrive with a solution and hope your business fits it. The day exists because we’d rather understand the business first — and we never automate a broken process.
The audit
£1,000The day on site, then — rapidly — a working prototype of your system. Software your team can click through, a one-page scope, and the price of the build. Not a report.
Prototype timing agreed when we book. If a shelf product genuinely fits you, the audit says so and points you at it.
The build
£4,000–£6,000The real system, live on your real data, your people trained on it. The audit fee comes off the price in full.
A fraction of a junior hire’s first year — for software an agency would quote months of day rates on.
The running of it
£1,000/monthIt keeps working and keeps improving: support, fixes, and a steady stream of small additions, working through the roadmap your audit found. A named person is on the escalation path.
Costs less than the part-time administrator you’d otherwise be hiring. Twelve-month term with a notice period.
Then Monday morning looks like this: the admin has already happened, and your best people are back on the work you actually hired them for.
04Proof
A real business already runs this way.
FiftyPlus, a UK business, runs day to day on software we designed, built and still run: the public website and its enquiry funnels, the member and partner portals, and the admin systems behind them.
The numbers — the size of the codebase, the tests, the releases — are counted straight from the repository and published exactly as found in the case study. Nothing rounded up, nothing projected.
Read the FiftyPlus case study05Why this is safe
Built properly. Run carefully.
Naming the mechanism cuts both ways: if agents write the software, what keeps it sound? Five rules, and none of them bend.
A person approves every plan and clicks through every change before it ships.
Nothing ships unless every automated test passes. No exceptions.
Logins, permissions, payments and security are handled by a person. Always.
Your people’s and your customers’ personal data stays out of error logs.
Every change is on the record — ticket, test run, deployment.
If the system is down or data is at risk, the founder responds personally, within hours. How that works day to day is on the How we work page.
06About us
A real person, nearby.
Stoic Software is a deliberately small practice run by Mark Heaver, a software consultant of almost thirty years — financial services, energy, platforms serving hundreds of thousands of users — and the named escalation point on every contract. He designed and built the systems FiftyPlus runs on; the case study tells that story.
We’re based in North East England, on purpose. Not a national consultancy, not an agency somewhere on the internet: someone you can get hold of, who comes to your building, and whose reputation lives in the same place yours does.
Small on purpose — every system gets built properly and run personally. More about the practice.
07Questions
Asked and answered, plainly.
What’s the catch?
There isn’t a hidden one, but there are two honest conditions. Your system runs on the same platform as every Stoic client — standard underneath, custom where your business needs it — because that’s what makes the price possible. And the licence runs on a twelve-month term, because half-maintained software helps nobody.
How is this different from the AI agencies emailing us?
They arrive with a product and hope your business fits it. We arrive with questions, and spend a full day inside your business before anything gets designed. You also know exactly who does the work and who answers when something breaks — one named person, in the North East, on the contract.
What actually happens in the audit?
A day on site: the morning with you on where the hours go, the rest with the people doing the work. Then we build a working prototype of the system that fixes it — software your team can click through, not a slide deck. You get the prototype, a one-page scope, the price of the build, and a short ranked note of what else we found — the roadmap the monthly service works through. We also list what you already pay for software, so any savings case is built from your own numbers, not projections.
We’re not technical. Is that a problem?
It’s the point. You explain how the business works; we do the translating. If you can describe your week, you can run this project.
Who is this for?
Owner-run businesses the big consultancies and software companies don’t serve: facilities maintenance, fire and security, signage, industrial coatings, energy and finance brokers — and any business whose processes never quite fit a shelf product. The shape of the problem matters more than the size of the company.
What happens to our system if something happens to you?
You’re covered. Continuity is part of every agreement: if we can’t look after you any more, you get an orderly handover of your system and your data. Nobody’s business should depend on one person being reachable.
Where does our data live and who can see it?
Your data stays yours. It lives in the system we run for you, access is limited to the people who need it, and personal data is kept out of error logs by design. The detail is on the How we work page.
What does the monthly fee cover, exactly?
Support, fixes, and a steady stream of small improvements. If something breaks, we fix it; if the business changes, the system changes with it. And we watch that it’s actually being used: if a workflow goes quiet, we call and fix the reason. A named person is the escalation point, in writing.
Can we leave?
Yes. Licences run on twelve-month terms with a notice period, and leaving is orderly by design — a proper handover, not a hostage negotiation.
One more thing
It costs nothing to talk.
We take on a small number of new clients each year, on purpose — every system gets built properly and run personally. If any of this sounds like your business, book a conversation.
Book an audit conversationNo newsletter. No chatbot. One form, read by a person.