Custom Software Development

TechnoDane's founding partner is a software developer with over twenty years experience developing custom software applications for businesses. We are always interested in partnering with small business to develop interesting applications. Businesses like yours are often not well served by custom software. It tends to be either too expensive to hire professional services, or it tends to be amateur-quality developed by inexperienced developers.

We avoid that by only taking on jobs that fit both you and us.

Specialized Handheld Products

We have a great deal of experience in developing handheld and mobile applications. We particularly like to develop for the PalmOS family of devices, not because they are the best or most powerful, but because they are the least expensive, both for us and for our clients.

That's our preference, but we will develop for any of the following:

• iPhone and iPod Touch
• PalmOS
• Windows Mobile (C# only)
• Blackberry/J2ME
• Any Linux-based handheld from Nokia or Sharp

Legacy Conversions

We do a great deal of work in helping companies migrate systems from legacy platforms (such as FilePro) to newer platforms, such as LAMP.

Web applications

Many customized applications can be rapidly and efficiently built on a web platform, even purely internal applications. We develop our web applications solely on a so-called "LAMP" platform (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), although Java is an option for the programming language. We do this to keep our skills high and our hiring and training costs low. We believe we can develop most applications faster and at lower cost this way than with any other platform. We have no objection if your prefer a different platform. We can even help you find a developer for other platforms, but we only develop for this one.

You will notice that we mention C# in the handheld section. That is because it is the best platform for Windows Mobile. When we build for Windows Mobile, we generally still have a "LAMP" backend accessed through web services (SOAP).

Other Applications

While handheld and web applications are our specialty, at one time or another our staff has built just about every kind of application you can imagine. Contact us about your needs and we will see if we are the company to meet them. If we are not, we'll help you find the right person or company to meet them.

Pricing

Hourly

We divide the process of software development into two activities: Design and Development. Design we bill at $150/hour and Development we bill at $110/hour.

Fixed bid

We also offer a fixed-bid process. A fixed bid requires $2800 deposit, of which only half is refundable if you choose not to go with our bid. If you accept our bid, the entire deposit is applied towards the total bid.

In fixed bid projects, we generally work on a 50% down, 50% upon completion basis. We are open to a milestones-based approach to split this into multiple payments, but we have a 35% minimum retainer to cover the cost of design and development resources lost to other TechnoDane work and internal projects.