We take on the software initiatives everyone else says are too hard. And we finish them.
Twenty years. Around twenty clients — most of whom stayed three to five years and came back with the next one. When an initiative is stuck, over budget, or past what the internal team can carry, we are the small senior team that gets it shipped.
10 months, under $1Mafter $50M and four years
A Fortune 5 retailer’s B2B marketplace had defeated internal teams and outside vendors. We delivered the MVP that went live to 100,000+ merchants and millions of products.
18 months, under $2Magainst a 5-year, $25M estimate
Replacing a global product catalog of millions of items — in flight, without taking the old one down. The replacement ran its ETL ten times faster.
800+ bots, 90% cheaperto build and maintain
KYC data pulled from 800+ sources for a Big 4 accounting firm, after two previous attempts were abandoned as too expensive to run.
Client names withheld by agreement. References available on request.
We sell judgment, not headcount
Which is why people tend to arrive at one of two moments.
A major initiative is in trouble
The date has moved twice. The architecture is fighting the roadmap. A vendor has delivered something nobody can maintain, or the estimate came back at five years and eight figures. You need someone who has seen this exact shape before and will say plainly what is wrong with it.
That is most of our work. Every number at the top of this page came from a project that was already in difficulty when we arrived.
You need a team, or just a straight answer
You know what you want to build and you need people who can actually build it, or you need to decide between three architectures before you commit a year to one of them.
We staff small and senior. A team of three or four people who have done it before will beat a team of fifteen who have not, and will cost less — which matters more now that good engineers with good AI tooling now accomplish what used to need a much larger team.
The first conversation is free. So is the second.
Bring us the architecture, the roadmap or the sprint that is stuck. We will spend an hour with your team and tell you what we would actually do about it. No deck, no pitch, no obligation — and we will tell you if you do not need us.
What we do
Two things. And one product we built, which is the section after this.
Software strategy & architecture
Architecture, build-versus-buy, platform choices, and the honest version of what an initiative will cost and how long it will take. Often the cheapest work we do and the most valuable.
How we do itSoftware engineering & delivery
Enterprise platforms, marketplaces, catalogs, data pipelines and production AI systems. A small senior team making the decisions, backed by engineers we have worked with for over a decade.
How we do itWe didn’t adopt AI. We built and shipped a product with it.
everTest, our sister company, turns plain-English test cases into production Playwright and Selenium code, in bulk, with human QA in the loop. SWStrategies designed and built it; our founder is its co-founder and president; it is running for paying customers today.
That matters to you for a practical reason. Plenty of firms will tell you they do AI. We have had to make an AI system behave reliably against real applications, every day, with customers watching — so we know what it genuinely costs, where it breaks, and which parts of the pitch are not true yet.
Selected work
Most of them were already in difficulty when we arrived. Client names are withheld by agreement; the numbers and the architecture are not, and we can substantiate any of them privately.
A B2B marketplace a Fortune 5 retailer had failed to build twice
$50M and four years of previous effort. MVP live in ten months for under $1M, serving 100,000+ merchants.
Read it Retail · data platformA global catalog of millions of items, replaced while running
Others quoted five years and $25M. Critical fixes in three months, full replacement in eighteen, ETL ten times faster.
Read it Financial services · automationKYC from 800+ sources, after two attempts were abandoned
100+ bots in weeks, 800+ in production within six months, 90% less to build and maintain than the approaches before it.
Read itWhat a rescue actually looks like
The second of those three, drawn out. Nobody saved $23M by writing faster code — the saving is in the shape of the plan, and the shape is the part we are hired for.
How the first six weeks work
Choosing an outside engineering team is slow, opaque and mostly done on vibes. So we go first: you get something working before you are committed to anything.
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You name the problem
Not the tidy version for the steering committee — the one that is actually hurting. We will ask uncomfortable questions about history, constraints and who has tried before.
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We build the context
Architecture, data, dependencies, the team, the politics. This is the step most vendors skip, and it is why their estimates are wrong.
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Within six weeks, something you can judge
Usually a proof of concept running against your real constraints. Sometimes an architecture, a validated plan or a tested technical direction — whichever one actually settles your question. By week six you will know how we think and how we estimate, and whether you want us. So will we.
Who you would actually be working with
Founded in 2006 by a CTO who was tired of watching offshore projects fail for reasons that were entirely preventable. We stayed deliberately small.
2006founded
~20strategists and engineers
~20clients in twenty years
3–5 yrstypical relationship
Twenty clients in twenty years is the number we are proudest of. It means we are not running a funnel — nearly every client has given us several projects over several years, and the work arrives through people who worked with us somewhere else.
Tell us what’s stuck.
An hour with your team, at no cost, and a straight answer about what we would do. If the answer is that you do not need us, that is the answer you will get.