There's always the part of the week nobody counts. The paperwork that has to get typed up, the numbers that have to be moved from one place to another, the thing you do at eight at night because it can't happen while real work is happening. For a physical therapist it's eighty handwritten forms that have to end up in a system. For someone else it's something else entirely. It's the same shape every time, and it's the kind of thing software is actually good at.
Commissioned Work
Software built for you, and for nobody else.
Every product on the market is a compromise. It has to work for a hundred thousand customers, so it works for none of them exactly. You learn its habits, you keep a spreadsheet on the side for the parts it can't do, and you tell yourself that's just how it is.
Commissioned work goes the other way. Seagull builds one thing for one person or one business. It does what you do, in the order you do it, using the words you use. Nothing else is in there.
Who this is for
- You want something for yourself. Not a business, not an idea worth pitching, just a thing that would make your own days or your family's easier, and it doesn't exist.
- You have an idea, and no interest in building a company around it.
- You run a small place where everyone knows how things work but nobody's written it down.
- You're part of a club, a practice, a studio, a group of neighbors who want something that isn't out there.
- You're a team inside somewhere bigger, tired of waiting your turn with IT.
There's no size you need to be. Plenty of people assume custom software isn't for them, and they're welcome here too.
How it works
It starts with a conversation, and there's no charge for that part. Tell us what your days look like, what you'd hand off in a heartbeat if you could, what makes a week go badly. We'll ask about the small stuff too, because that's usually where the real answer is hiding. Sometimes we'll tell you that you don't need software at all, and that's a fine outcome.
If there's something worth building, you'll hear what it takes before anything starts. Nothing gets built without you knowing what you're getting into, and you'll see it working along the way rather than waiting around for it.
Examples
Sometimes the thing that's missing isn't a chore, it's just something that doesn't exist yet. A neighborhood association runs pop-up beer gardens that land on different blocks every weekend, and everyone asks the same question: which ones can I do in one afternoon? Nobody is going to build that for them. It's too small, too local, too specific to their blocks and their weekends. That's exactly the kind of thing worth building.
Or it's something you want to do that nothing quite lets you. You and your friends pass songs back and forth, except one of you is on Spotify, one's on Apple Music, and half the links never open. The song is sitting there on both services. The apps just don't talk. So you build something that does, and a playlist you made lands in your friend's library on whatever they use.
Or you know exactly what would fix it, and you can't get anyone to build it. Your team has been asking for the same small thing for a year now, the one that would take the worst part of the week off everyone's plate. It's in a queue somewhere behind forty other requests, and every quarter it slips again. Nobody's against it. It's just never the most important thing on anyone else's list. So you keep doing it the slow way, with the clever fix someone on the team came up with and nobody outside it has ever heard of. The idea was good when you had it and it's still good now. It can get built without waiting for your turn to come around.
What you end up with
Something that belongs to you. It does your job and nothing else. No features you'll never touch, no accounts to administer, no subscription that changes under you every quarter.
Come tell us what you wish you had.
shop@seagull.dev