What I build
The five jobs that come up over and over.
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Two systems that won’t talk to each other
from $900
Orders land in one system, invoices live in another, and somebody spends part of every day retyping between the two. That person usually knows it’s a waste and has no way out of it. This is the cheapest thing on the list and often the one that pays for itself first.
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The spreadsheet that turned into the business
from $1,500
It started as a way to track one thing. Now it does quoting and scheduling and half of payroll, it’s thirty tabs deep, and one person understands the formulas. When that person is on vacation, work slows down. I turn it into something the rest of the team can use without breaking it, and I keep the logic you already worked out rather than replacing it with mine. What I can’t tell you before opening the file is how much of that logic is actually in the formulas and how much of it lives in the head of whoever built it, and that difference is most of what decides how long the job takes.
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Internal tools and dashboards
from $1,500
Somebody spends Monday morning pulling numbers out of four different places and pasting them into a report nobody opens until Thursday. I’ll have the machine do the pulling, so the report becomes one screen that’s correct whenever you happen to look at it.
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Customer-facing builds
from $1,500
Booking flows, quote calculators, a portal where your customers can look up their own jobs. These cost more than a website does because there is real logic underneath (who can book what, when, at what price, and what happens when two people want the same Tuesday), and that logic is where this kind of project usually goes wrong.
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Rescues
from $900
The developer stopped answering email. Or the site is held together by eleven plugins and updating any one of them breaks checkout. I’ll read what’s actually there and tell you whether it’s worth saving. Sometimes it isn’t, and I’d rather say so in the first week than the sixth.
Bigger jobs start at $5,000 and get quoted exactly the same way. I’ve built and run systems well past anything on this list, so if what you need doesn’t fit the five, describe it anyway and we’ll work out what it actually is.
How it works
How a job actually goes.
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A half-hour call, no charge.
You don’t need a spec written up first. Describe what’s going wrong and how it gets handled today, and I’ll ask enough questions to price it. If there’s already a product that does this for forty dollars a month, that’s what I’ll tell you, and the call ends there with both of us better off.
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A quote you can hold me to.
Usually within two business days you get a document saying what I’m building, what it costs and when it will be finished. The number doesn’t move unless you change what you asked for, and if you do change it, you get the new number before I do the work rather than after. Half up front, half on delivery.
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You end up owning it.
Most of these take one or two weeks. When it’s finished the code is yours, the hosting account is in your name, and there is no monthly fee to me for the privilege of running software you already paid for. If something breaks in the first thirty days I fix it, and that isn’t a support contract, it’s just what finishing the job means.
I run two or three of these at once and no more, so there are stretches where the honest answer is that I can’t start for three weeks. You’ll hear that on the call, not after you’ve signed something.
Proof
The rest of what I build.
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A manufacturing company runs on a system I wrote.
It takes a job from a 3D design through to shop drawings, a cut list and a cost, all off the same data, so nothing gets redrawn or retyped on the way. It’s in daily production use. If it stops, the shop stops, which is a useful thing to have had riding on your work before somebody hands you theirs.
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I built the platform I run everything else on.
Code hosting, code review, the automated test and deploy pipelines, written by one person and now hosting its own source. That was not a sensible thing to do and I’d talk a client out of it. It does mean the boring parts of your project, getting it onto a server and putting changes out without breaking anything, are things I do several times a week rather than things I’ll be working out as I go.
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The servers are mine. So is the AI infrastructure.
There’s a gateway I wrote that routes work between machines I own and GPUs I rent by the second, and shuts the rented ones off when nothing is using them, because I’m the one paying for them. Hosting, backups, and the part where you find out whether a backup actually restores: I do those on my own systems, so they aren’t something I’d be learning on yours.
Your project will be one of the smaller things I build this year, and that is precisely why it can be finished in two weeks for two thousand dollars.
Who you’re hiring
Who you’re actually dealing with.
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You talk to the person doing the work.
The person who quotes it is the person who writes it and the person who puts it on a server. Nothing gets relayed through an account manager, so you never get the version of an answer that has been through two people who don’t code.
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I explain things.
I have a mathematics degree and I taught calculus and algebra for years before doing this full time, which mostly means I’ve had a lot of practice explaining one thing four different ways until one of them lands. You should expect to understand what I built and why I built it that way. If you don’t, that’s my problem to fix, not yours to study for.
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Deployment is part of the job.
A lot of freelance work ends the moment the code runs on the developer’s laptop, and then the client discovers that getting it onto the internet is a second project nobody quoted. I finish at the point where it’s running on a server, the passwords are in your hands, and there are notes explaining how to keep it alive.
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I work with teams that already have developers.
Not every job here is for a company without a developer. Sometimes it’s overflow, or a well-defined piece nobody has a spare month for, or a second pair of eyes on something that’s been stuck a while. I’ll write to your conventions in your stack, and I won’t spend the first week telling you what’s wrong with them.
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Why it costs what it costs.
Two thousand dollars used to buy a template and an afternoon. It buys more now. AI tooling has made the mechanical part of writing software genuinely fast, and I’ve spent two years building my own tooling on top of that rather than reading about other people doing it. What it has not made faster — and this is where the low price gets misread as thin work — is deciding what to build, which is settled long before anyone opens an editor and is where a project of this size is usually won or lost. That part still needs somebody who has done it before, and it is the thing you are actually paying for.
Tell me what’s broken.
Half an hour, no charge, and I’m not going to try to talk you into anything. Tell me what’s going wrong and roughly how it gets handled today, and I’ll tell you whether software is even the right answer and what it would run you if it is.