You speak to the person writing the code
No account manager sits in the middle. Adam takes the brief, writes the software and answers the phone when something stops.
Bamber Devo
Bamber Devo
Market Harborough · Leicestershire
Most business software doesn't fail because it was built badly. It fails because nobody has looked at it since the day it went live. We build, audit and maintain the systems small companies actually depend on.
How this practice is set up
Every one of them costs us work. They also explain why the systems we look after are still standing.
No account manager sits in the middle. Adam takes the brief, writes the software and answers the phone when something stops.
Audits, integrations and migrations are quoted as a number before we start. A day rate rewards slowness, so we only use one for genuinely open-ended work.
Software that nobody owns is the entire problem we exist to solve. We are not going to create more of it.
Support means being reachable at half four on a Friday. That stops being true past a certain number, so we stop before it does.
Inside the work
There is not much theatre to it. Somebody reads your code properly, somebody watches the thing run under load, and then you are told plainly what was found.
About
In March 2019 the stock system at a haulage firm outside Leicester quietly stopped writing to its database on a Friday evening. Adam Bamber, then the only developer in the building, spent the weekend reconstructing two days of movements from log files.
Nobody had opened that codebase in four years. It had not been written badly. It had been left, which is a different failure and a far more common one. The company had paid for software once, in 2015, and assumed that was the transaction complete.
Bamber Devo took its first client in October 2019 from a spare room on Kettering Road. The work splits roughly in half: new builds for companies whose spreadsheets have run out of road, and rescue work on systems whose original author has long since moved on. Both come with a maintenance arrangement, because the first half turns into the second half otherwise.
We work mostly in .NET and Node, host on Azure or AWS, and hand over the credentials, the documentation and the repository at the end. You should be able to sack us without it becoming an incident.
We don't build marketing websites, we don't take on brochure redesigns, and we turn down anything we couldn't still be supporting in five years' time. If what you need is a designer, we will say so on the first call and give you two names.
Before you look at the price list
You don't need a quote to find out whether your system is in trouble. Book a video call, no charge, and we will tell you what we would look at first, including the times when the honest answer is that nothing needs doing yet.
Services and prices
Every figure below is a real starting point, not a headline. If your job doesn't fit one of these, say so on the call and we will price it properly.
Two weeks inside your codebase, hosting and access list. You end up with a written report, a ranked risk register and a fixed quote for fixing whatever actually matters. Plenty of audits conclude that you should change nothing yet.
Quoting tools, internal portals, stock and job systems: the thing the off-the-shelf option nearly does. Built in .NET or Node, hosted where you can see it, delivered in fortnightly increments you can use before it's finished.
For the system that runs the business and hasn't been touched since the person who wrote it left. We stabilise, document and monitor first. Modernising comes second, and sometimes never, which is a legitimate outcome.
Getting Xero, your CRM and your warehouse system to agree with each other. Usually costs less than a year of the re-keying it replaces, and we will tell you when it doesn't.
Laptops, mailboxes, backups, patching and the Monday-morning printer. Response inside two working hours, and a named person rather than a ticket queue. Suits teams of roughly five to forty.
Moving off the server in the cupboard, or off a cloud bill nobody in the building can explain. Azure or AWS, costed before we start, documented and handed over at the end.
Prices are a guide and confirmed in writing after the first call. Ad-hoc engineering outside a retainer is £585 a day. Nothing is invoiced before a scope has been agreed in writing.
Two weeks, £1,150, and a document you can hand to your accountant, your insurer or the next developer. If the finding is that your systems are fine as they are, we write that down too and invoice you for the fortnight.
Get in touch
Thirty minutes on a call, no charge, and you will get a straight answer about whether we are the right people. If we aren't, you will leave with the name of someone who is.
