Nearly finished is not finished.

A sixty-page specification is a way of postponing the moment somebody has to be wrong. It looks like diligence. Most of the time it is insurance.

We watched that up close. Between the two of us there are eleven years inside agencies where the discovery phase billed beautifully and the build phase quietly slipped, and where “in scope” was settled by whoever kept the better email trail. The projects that actually worked were never the ones with the thickest documents. They were the ones where somebody put a rough working screen in front of a real user in the second week and let them hate it.

So Zaffreai runs it the other way round. We write the smallest scope we can honestly defend, then we build. You get a demo every Thursday, in a browser, on a URL you can send to your operations manager. If we have built the wrong thing, you find out on day nine rather than in month five, when the invoice has already been paid and everyone is too committed to say so.

We would rather show you something ugly that works this Thursday than something beautiful that works in June.

A few things we do not do. We do not sell fixed-price-fixed-everything: software that never changes is software nobody used. We do not take on support clients we cannot answer the same working day, which is why the plans below have a hard cap on numbers. And we do not hold code hostage. The repository sits in your organisation from the first commit, not at the end once the invoices have cleared.

None of this suits everybody. Some buyers genuinely want the sixty pages, a signed appendix and a single delivery date twelve months out. That is a legitimate way to buy software. It is not the way we build it, and we would rather say so on the homepage than in month three.

We work from Runcorn and take on clients across the North West and the rest of the UK. Most of the work arrives by referral from somebody whose last project went badly somewhere else.