Custom software and AI development for South African businesses

No. SpiderHunts Technologies Ltd is registered in London, our engineers work from Lahore, and every South African project is delivered remotely. We have no Johannesburg or Cape Town office, no local staff and no local partner arrangement, and we would rather say so plainly than imply a presence we do not have. What we do have is a working day that overlaps almost entirely with yours, and clients who have worked with us this way since 2020.

South African Standard Time is one hour ahead of London in British summer and two hours ahead in winter, and three hours behind our engineers in Lahore. In practice your morning is already the middle of their day, so calls, demos and questions land inside normal South African business hours. We fix a regular slot that suits your calendar rather than asking you to work late, and keep day-to-day discussion in writing on Slack, Teams or WhatsApp so nothing waits for a meeting.

Yes, and for most South African projects we assume we have to. That usually means a progressive web or mobile app that keeps its own local database, lets staff carry on capturing while the power or the line is down, queues each change with a timestamp, and syncs when connectivity returns with clear rules for conflicts. The interface tells the user what has synced and what has not, so nobody has to guess. On the server side we make operations idempotent so a retried upload cannot double-post a transaction.

We design builds to support POPIA obligations and your organisation stays the responsible party. Practically, we agree the purpose and lawful basis for each piece of personal information, keep collection to what the process needs, build the access, correction, objection and deletion paths, log who saw and changed what, set retention rules, and document where data sits and which processors touch it, so your information officer has records to work from if the Information Regulator asks. We do not issue certifications, sign off compliance or act as your legal adviser.

Wherever you decide. If personal information should stay in the country we deploy to AWS af-south-1 in Cape Town, Azure South Africa North in Johannesburg or Google Cloud africa-south1, all of which run inside South Africa. Some clients prefer London or Frankfurt for cost or for services not yet in the local region, which is a decision we make with you at architecture stage and record in writing. Backups follow the same rule as the primary database; we do not quietly restore them somewhere else.

Our contracts are UK contracts and we quote and invoice in GBP or USD. Where finance needs a rand figure to approve, we state the ZAR equivalent at the rate on the day of the quote so the budget line matches something recognisable, while the invoice total stays in the contract currency. Payment is by bank transfer. Exchange rate movement between quote and payment, and any bank or conversion charges your bank applies, sit on your side, and we say which is which in the quote rather than burying it.

Yes, and this is a real question for South African firms now that buyers ask an assistant for a shortlist before they search. Answer engines quote pages they can parse and trust, so the work is structural: state what you do, where you operate and who you serve as plain extractable facts, add schema markup, answer real questions in the page itself rather than in a brochure PDF, and keep the pages an AI crawler can actually read. We then check which questions surface you and which return a competitor. Nobody can promise a placement in an AI answer, and anyone who does is guessing.

We work in English, and English is what almost every South African business system we have built runs in. If you need isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans, Sesotho or another official language in the interface, we build the application so language is a first-class setting rather than an afterthought, with the text held separately from the code, right formatting for dates and currency, and room for longer strings in the layout. You or a translator you choose supply the wording; we do not translate it ourselves and would not want to.

We hold no B-BBEE scorecard, so spending with us earns your business no procurement recognition. For enterprise and public-sector tenders where that matters, a locally rated supplier is usually the better answer and we will say so. Companies still work with us where the requirement does not apply, where we are one part of a larger programme, or where the specialist skill is the deciding factor. The decision about how to structure that procurement is yours, and we do not claim a local partner we do not have.

Yes. The integrations we are asked for most are the local payment gateways, PayFast, Peach Payments, Ozow, Yoco and SnapScan, along with DebiCheck-authenticated debit orders, EFT reconciliation from bank statement files, and SARS eFiling and CIPC lookups where a system needs tax or company registry data. Where a bank or provider offers a documented API we build against it; where it does not, we are honest that file-based reconciliation is the realistic option rather than promising a live feed.

The same as anywhere else on our site: a single-purpose AI agent is £5,000–£12,000 over 2–4 weeks, an internal tool or MVP £8,000–£20,000 over 4–8 weeks, a business web application £20,000–£45,000 over 2–4 months, and a focused machine learning model £8,000–£25,000 from six weeks. Offline behaviour and integrations with local gateways add scope, so we price them explicitly. Cloud hosting and third-party fees are yours. You get a written quote after the free scoping call.

It changes what we decide early rather than what we build. Multiple currencies, tax rules and languages are much cheaper to design in than to retrofit, so if Namibia, Botswana, Kenya or Nigeria are on the roadmap we keep currency, tax and locale as data instead of hard-coded assumptions and keep the payment layer swappable. We will not claim experience with a regulator we have not worked under; for each new market you will need local advice on data protection and licensing.