Off-the-shelf software arrives finished and asks your team to change how they work. I measure first and build to fit. You get working software in your team's hands in the first two weeks, then we adjust it together until it sits right. Fixed price, full source code, and it's yours to run. What should we build?
Not mockups and not templates. One reads Philadelphia's public records, the other a UK government API I hold approved credentials for. Both are in client hands, and both were shaped week by week with the people who use them. Clients are anonymized here — happy to walk you through either one on a call.
Their business-development lead was checking half a dozen sources by hand every week, hunting for projects in the narrow window before a job goes out to bid — while it's real, but the contractor hasn't been picked.
A scored lead pipeline reading the city's public records API live, joined on the property. Nothing scraped, nothing to log into, nothing overnight to go stale. Every lead opens with who to call, and it cross-checks their CRM so nobody cold-calls a relationship the firm already has.
We layered in additional public-records signals most people in the market aren't watching — surfacing likely projects well ahead of the typical bid window, and labeling how firm each one is rather than overstating it. The specifics stay with the client.
In progress: scoring each lead against their own historical deal data, so the feed ranks by fit — the projects that look like the work they actually win, and win profitably — instead of everything that moves.
Most bookings arrived as messages on their Facebook page — the rest by phone or someone walking in. The day's diary lived in a social inbox rather than somewhere the whole team could see it, no booking could complete without someone typing back, and any price change meant asking a developer.
Customers enter their number plate and get a free instant report on their actual car — straight from the UK government's vehicle-testing API, which I applied for and was credentialed on. It recommends the exact work that car needs and books it. Staff get a shared diary, job tracking, payments and reporting behind a sign-in.
Because the app knows the exact vehicle — make, model, engine size, fuel — every price shown is that car's price, not a "from £" that changes at the counter. The owner edits his own services and hours in the app, live in seconds. Delivered remotely, to UK GDPR.
The security, testing and integration depth you'd expect from enterprise software — on a budget a small or mid-sized business can actually sign off. AI-assisted development is what lets one experienced person deliver what used to take a team of five. Here's what that buys you.
Most agencies sell you a discovery phase, then a design phase, then a build phase, then a hand-off phase. Each one is quoted and billed separately, and you don't touch working software until the end. I work differently. Something your team can open and use inside the first two weeks. Real feedback every week after that. Course correction is part of the build, not a change order.
Both builds above went from first conversation to a clickable tool running on the client's own real data in under two weeks — then hardened from there. AI-assisted development is what lets one experienced person deliver the polish, security and integration depth that used to need a team of five, at a price that works for a business doing $1M to $25M in revenue.
If one of these sounds like your week, that's the conversation. Each one below is a real problem a client described to me — and what got built to end it.
"Someone on my team checks six websites every morning and pastes what they find into a spreadsheet."
"Nobody can tell me what's in the pipeline without opening four spreadsheets and asking two people."
"Our bookings live in a Facebook inbox and a phone line. If nobody replies, we lose the job."
"Every time I want to change a price, I have to email a developer and wait — and then pay for it."
"Half my team is never at a desk. If it doesn't work on a phone, it doesn't get used."
"The last thing we had broke, and nobody could tell us why or how much of our data was exposed."
On AI, honestly: both clients above told me they did not want an AI making decisions in their workflow, and both were right. So the core logic in each build is deterministic — plain, testable, explainable code. AI is what makes me fast enough to build it at this price, and it goes into the product itself only where it clearly earns its place, behind a flag, priced separately, and never sending anything on your behalf without a human reading it first.
The honest answer is that I don't know until we've talked — it depends on where your team is losing hours. But to make it less abstract, here are specific tools that fit a $2,500–$12,000 budget and a 4–14 week timeline. If one of these makes you nod, that's where we start.
Most software projects fail in the same place: the people building the tool never actually sat with the people who'd have to use it. They built from a written spec instead of from watching the work — and the result technically functions but nobody wants to open it. So I build in front of your team and let them redirect it while it's cheap to redirect. You're never waiting months to find out if we're on track, and you're never handed something you didn't help shape.
Hi — I'm Alex, the human behind Craig Creative. After 14 years across military operations, Big Four technology consulting, and Fortune 50 enterprise product delivery, I started this for one reason: most growing businesses can't get to the software talent they actually need.
A custom build from an agency generally starts around $50,000 and buys you an account manager sitting between you and whoever is actually writing your code. Go the other way and a cheap freelancer hands you something undocumented and untested that breaks the first time your business changes. I'm the third option: enterprise-grade delivery, at independent-developer cost, and you talk to the person building it.
What you get from the background is judgment about which problems are worth solving. Military execution discipline, consulting-trained strategy, and the delivery standards of a Fortune 50 product org — pointed at your actual business problem rather than at whatever's technically interesting. The test is whether it gives your team hours back and takes cost out. If it doesn't do that, I'll say so before you spend anything.
Every project is scoped and priced upfront. If something changes, we talk about it — you're never hit with unexpected costs.
The upfront number is the one people compare, and it's the wrong one. Put your real figures in below — I've left placeholders, not estimates, because I have no idea what your stack costs.
The usual way to hit a low price is to quietly skip the security and testing work — and you find out about eighteen months later. None of the following is an upgrade, an add-on, or reserved for the biggest package. It is in all of them.
A 30-minute conversation costs nothing and tells us everything. Worst case, you walk away with a clearer plan than you came in with.
The best way to find out if I can help is a real conversation. Tell me what's frustrating you and what you wish was easier — I'll give you an honest answer, not a sales pitch.
There's zero obligation after the call. If I'm not the right fit, I'll tell you that too.