Custom software development company in San Francisco

No. We have no US entity, no US office and nobody on the payroll in the United States. We are a UK-registered company working with Bay Area clients remotely, with a daily overlap between our afternoon and your morning.

Our working afternoon overlaps your morning. In practice that means a call window before your day fills up, and work landing in your inbox overnight. It is a real constraint and we would rather set it out than gloss over it.

We contract as a UK company and invoice in US dollars. Terms your counsel expects - IP assignment, confidentiality, security obligations - are familiar. Anything that requires a US entity we cannot do.

Projects are quoted in pounds sterling and invoiced in US dollars at the rate agreed in the quote, so both sides know the dollar figure before work starts. Invoices are raised by SpiderHunts Technologies Ltd against a written scope with milestones, and we can complete a W-8BEN-E for your accounts payable team. Payment by ACH, wire or card. Your legal team is welcome to work from your own master services agreement rather than ours.

In your accounts, not ours. Chicago teams commonly choose Azure North Central US, which sits in Illinois, or AWS us-east-2 in Ohio and Google Cloud us-central1 in Iowa, all a short network hop from the city and from the interconnect facilities downtown. Code goes to your GitHub, GitLab or Azure DevOps. Engineers get named, least-privilege access you can revoke at any time, and production data stays out of development environments unless you ask otherwise.

Yes, and it is the single most Chicago-specific thing on this page. BIPA covers fingerprints, face geometry, voiceprints, iris and retina scans, and it applies to employees as well as customers. In practice that means informed written consent before anything is collected, a published retention and destruction schedule, no sale or profit from biometric identifiers, and a private right of action that lets individuals sue directly rather than waiting for a regulator. So we design around it: a time-and-attendance app gets a badge or PIN option rather than a fingerprint by default, a face or voice feature gets a consent record stored with the identifier and a deletion job that actually runs, and vendor choices get checked for where the template is processed. The legal judgement stays with your counsel; we build the software to match what they decide.

Yes. Chicago firms usually have a well-served front office and a back office held together by spreadsheets, so that is where we work: trade capture and reconciliation, break resolution, position and exposure reporting that agrees with itself, and commission, fee and rebate calculation where the rules are too firm-specific for a vendor product. We are software engineers, not a broker-dealer or a compliance consultancy. Your compliance team defines the rules and the retention requirements; we build systems that enforce them with role-based access, immutable audit logs and reviewable data lineage.

Yes, and Chicago is where that gets interesting, because it is the interchange point for every Class I railroad in the country. We build track-and-trace that merges rail EDI status messages, drayage telematics and terminal appointment feeds into one timeline per container, load and quoting tools tuned to how your desk prices freight, carrier and yard scheduling portals, and settlement and invoice-audit tools that find a billing dispute before the customer does. Integrations are built defensively, with retries, idempotency and reconciliation, because a feed will eventually send a malformed record at three in the morning.

That is usually what we recommend. Midwest manufacturers carry decades of accumulated systems, and the ERP is generally the immovable object; a rip-and-replace is where most of the money and most of the risk goes. We build the layer above it instead — scheduling that models constraints the ERP does not, quality and traceability, downtime and maintenance tracking, and reporting that surfaces shop-floor data without a six-figure module. Our note on integrating with an ERP rather than replacing it covers the approach.

We build to the technical safeguards HIPAA expects: encryption in transit and at rest, unique user identity, role-based access, automatic logoff, integrity checks and audit logs of who saw which record. We will not call the result HIPAA-compliant, because compliance covers your policies, training, contracts and physical controls as well as the software. Whether a business associate agreement is needed, and what it should say, is a decision for your counsel. Integration with clinical systems is normally through HL7 or FHIR interfaces your own team controls.

You get a written quote after a free scoping call. As typical ranges from our service pages: an internal tool or MVP is £8,000–£20,000 over 4–8 weeks, a business web application £20,000–£45,000 over 2–4 months, and a larger platform or modernisation £45,000–£80,000+ over 3–6 months. A focused machine learning model is £8,000–£25,000 and a single-purpose AI agent £5,000–£12,000. Those are quoted in pounds and invoiced in dollars; cloud and third-party licence costs are separate and stay in your own accounts.

Not in Chicago. We are remote-first, so day-to-day work happens over video, Slack or Teams and a shared board. If you are ever in London, you are welcome at the office there. Where a project would normally open with an on-site workshop, we run a longer video session across two or three Central Time mornings instead, which works better over a six-hour gap than one long day does.