The tool does sixty percent of the job
You pay for software that nearly fits, and your team has built spreadsheets and email threads around the gaps. The workaround has become the process.
Custom web application development
You have probably already tried the off-the-shelf tool. It did about sixty percent of what you needed, and your team built spreadsheets around the rest. We build the other forty percent, as software that fits the way you actually work.
Is this you
When a website stops being enough.
A website presents information. An application does work: logins, records that change, steps that have to happen in order. Most businesses cross that line without noticing, and keep patching around it. These are the usual signs.
One person holds the process
There is a sequence of steps that only works because somebody remembers it. When they are on holiday, it stops.
The same data lives in four places
It is typed into a form, then a spreadsheet, then the accounting tool, then a report. Every copy is a chance to be wrong.
You are paying per seat for features you never use
Enterprise pricing for a fraction of an enterprise product, growing every time you hire.
Clients keep asking you for a status update
Because there is nowhere for them to look. A portal would answer it once instead of forty times.
You were told it is not possible
Usually by somebody whose platform cannot do it. That is a limit of the platform, not of software.
What we build
Five shapes this usually takes.
Most projects are one of these, or two of them joined together. If yours is none of them, that is still worth a conversation.
Internal tools and dashboards
The thing your team opens every morning. Jobs, statuses, approvals, and the numbers that currently take two hours to assemble by hand.
Client and partner portals
Somewhere for the people you work with to look things up themselves, instead of emailing you for a status update.
Data pipelines and APIs
Feeds from several sources, normalised into one shape and served over an API your site or app can actually use. We have built this for multi-source property inventory.
Custom WordPress plugins
When the site is right but the plugin directory has nothing that fits. We have written search, calendar and booking, and form handling plugins from scratch.
Search over your own content
Proper search across your records, documents, or catalogue, rather than whatever the platform shipped with.
Proof
We build these for ourselves first.
Zinc runs on software we wrote. That is not a portfolio you have to take our word for, it is a set of systems you can open right now, and the ones behind them that keep this business running.
Public, live
ZOS Tools
Thirty developer utilities on their own subdomain, free and open to anyone. Fast, built for search, and backed by a live SEO audit tool that scores any site on request. Go and use it, then judge the work.
tools.zinconlinesolutions.com
Internal
Our outreach system
A system that finds prospects, researches them, and handles our outreach end to end. It is how this business fills its calendar, and it was built the same way we would build yours.
Internal
Our cost and ticketing tools
A dashboard that attributes every piece of cloud infrastructure to the client it belongs to, and the ticketing system our support runs on. Unglamorous, and exactly the kind of thing most businesses actually need.
How we build
Experience first, tools second.
We pick the tools that fit the problem rather than the ones we happen to like. What matters more is that the result is documented, reproducible, and handed over in a state another developer could pick up.
Fifteen years on AWS
Every system we build runs on cloud infrastructure we have been working with since before most agencies offered it. Sized to what you actually need, not to a package.
Whatever fits the job
Angular is our preference for applications, but we work across React, Next.js, WordPress, and older stacks like ColdFusion when that is what a business already runs on.
Written down, not remembered
Environments are defined as code and documented, so the system can be rebuilt, moved, or handed to someone else without archaeology.
Built to be handed over
No proprietary layer and nothing that only we understand. The test we apply is whether another developer could take it on without calling us.
Built for you. Owned by you.
Your accounts
It runs in your AWS account, on your domain, with billing in your name. We get access while we are working and you can revoke it the day we finish.
Your code
The repository transfers to you, documented, with the Terraform that builds the environment. Another developer can pick it up without calling us.
No lock-in
There is no licence, no per-seat fee, and nothing that stops working when you stop paying us. If you outgrow us, you leave with everything.
How it works
Smallest useful version first.
Custom software goes wrong when it is specified for a year and delivered all at once. We build the part that earns its keep first, put it in front of real work, and go from there.
Walk us through the work
You show us how it happens today, spreadsheets and all. We are looking for the step that costs the most and the one nobody can explain.
Scope and fixed price
A written scope, a fixed price, and an explicit list of what it will not do in version one.
Build the first useful piece
Not a prototype, a working slice you can put real work through while the rest of the process carries on alongside it.
Use it, then decide
You run it on your own data before committing to the rest. Sometimes the first piece turns out to be enough.
Build out and hand over
The remainder, then the repository, the infrastructure, the documentation, and your team trained to run it.
Common questions
Custom application questions we get asked
It depends entirely on scope, which is why the first conversation is free and ends with a written number. The honest range is wide: a focused internal tool is a different project to a multi-role portal. What does not vary is that you get a fixed price in writing before anything starts, and we build the smallest useful piece first so you are not committing the whole budget on day one.
Rarely. If a spreadsheet and a few email threads are holding a process together, that is usually a small build and a large relief. The projects we turn down are the ones where off-the-shelf software already does the job well, and we would rather tell you that in the first conversation than take the work anyway.
Often, yes. The first step is reading what is there and telling you what condition it is in, which is a piece of work in its own right. If the code is maintainable we pick it up and carry on. If it is not, we will say so plainly and talk through what rebuilding the important parts would involve, rather than quietly charging you to fight it.
Off-the-shelf software is built for the average of everyone who might buy it, which is why it tends to do about sixty percent of what you need. Custom software is built around how your business actually works, so there is no gap left for spreadsheets to fill. It also costs more up front, and it is worth it only when the workaround is costing you more than the build would.
No. You need someone who knows how the work actually happens, which is usually the person doing it rather than anyone technical. We make the technical decisions and explain the ones that affect cost or timing in plain language. What we do need is someone who can answer questions and approve things, because a build stalls fastest when nobody is able to make a decision.
You ask, and it changes. The code is yours, it is documented, and it is written in a standard structure another developer could pick up, so you are not tied to us. Most clients keep us on for changes because it is simpler, not because they have no choice. If you ever move the work elsewhere, nothing about how it is built is designed to make that difficult.
GET IN TOUCH
Have a project in mind?
Tell us what you are trying to fix. We will come back with a straight answer about whether we are the right team for it, and what it would cost.
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Fort Lauderdale, Florida
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