Transform your business with customised software solutions
You can be confident you’re dealing with a technology partner that delivers absolute transparency, clear processes, dedicated project management and smooth communication along each phase of the product development cycle.
Hatchet builds software solutions for companies of all sizes. We partner with established Perth brands and agencies right down to start-ups to create efficient and user-friendly solutions to business processes.
Our team comprises of highly skilled developers, product designers and quality testers with a small dedicated team approach that empowers us to deliver innovative solutions tailored to the unique needs of our clients.
Please take a look through a few of our case studies that have transformed the way that some of our customers do business: https://hatchet.com.au/case-studies
We love solving complex business problems; so what’s your latest challenge?
Product Development
Lean & Effective Approach
Discovery & Workshop
Every software project that goes through our team is subject to a robust ideation and vetting process during the initial discovery & workshop.
We’ll put the time into understanding your business problem as well as the technical challenge to help you identify a minimal viable product or a fully-fledged solution.
Allowing you to put your software in front of users and investors quicker.
Sprint Planning
We use the latest agile development methodologies to deliver our projects; assigning a dedicated team of designers, developers and QA testers to your project.
Because we work in small nimble teams we’re able to pivot and iterate during the process.
Ensuring any new considerations and features are added to the process as the product evolves on spec and at cost.
User Interface
We believe software development is about more than just coding.
It’s about delivering an immersive, responsive and user friendly experience that not only gets the job done, but in a way that delights.
Our experienced UX designers work hand-in-hand with our development team to always keep the user at the centre of everything we do.
Bespoke Software Development Process
The Project Plan
Free Initial Consultation
We’ll delve into your software requirements from a technology and business standpoint and walk you through the product development process to see if Hatchet is the right partner for you.
In person, at our Perth office or over a conference call.
Validate Your Product
Once you’re confident you’re ready to go ahead, we’ll put you through a discovery workshop to ensure the robustness of the product.
With the go-ahead we’ll then move to conceptualise the most efficient execution that delivers an exceptional customer experience and business outcome.
Providing a scoped project estimate on an initial prototype or complete development that you can bring forward to potential customers and investors.
Develop an MVP
Through our agile iterative process, we strive to put out an MVP within project deadlines and costs, building block by block upon versions of your product until you have the perfect solution for your business and customers.
We map out a roadmap for custom software fulfilling client’s requirements, then develop the software product in sprints, making ourselves flexible on scope and lean in delivering iterative deadlines.
Always available Maintenance & ongoing support
Once a project has moved from concept to reality we complete software development and offer you ongoing customer service support through a range of tiered support options.
From managing resources and code to mitigating potential future security breaches you have a trusted partner you can count on to support the software over its lifecycle.
Custom Software Development FAQ
What technical stack does Hatchet use for software development?
Our first choice is to use open-source software development tools. We’ve found that the following stack, albeit it’s not appropriate in every situation, works best for our clients:
Laravel, a modern open-source framework voted the best framework for 2022 has given us the tools to create the very best apps for our clients. Laravel is written in PHP, the same thing that powers Facebook and 78% of the internet!
VueJS, our front-end developers love to give users that feeling, and they can’t get enough of it. It communicates directly with Laravel to deliver actions seamlessly, eliminating endless page refreshing and presenting immediate information back to the user.
AWS, being AWS certified as both Solutions Architect and DevOps Engineers, our team’s preference is to roll out your solution into a safe and secure Enterprise-grade architecture that’s scalable and highly reliable.
And more…
Why choose custom software over an off-the-shelf solution?
Custom software is far more flexible and tailored to unique business requirements.
Businesses often find themselves reaching the technical limits of off-the-shelf software as they grow. It also offers zero competitive advantage, as all your competitors are often using the same or similar platforms.
A Hatchet custom software solution directly addresses your business needs, has a strong, capable team supporting its evolution and are coded in industry-standard, open-source frameworks that don’t lock you in.
How much does it cost to develop custom software?
In general, small projects tend to run in the $25-50K range, medium are around $50-100K and large software applications are $100K+.
Projects tend to scale along lines of functionality and complexity. Projects that require multiple platforms and complex business logic will require a larger investment in ux/ui, backend development and quality testing.
The Hatchet team can assist you in building our iteratively or develop an early MVP structure to keep the development process lean and avoid any costly re-writes.
What software methodology do you use?
We operate to agile development principles, operating small dedicated teams of designers, developers and quality testers to ensures you get an effective, cohesive product.
We also work to the minimal viable product (MVP) development principle, staging out development cycles iteratively, to avoid any costly rewrites of code and ensuring development progresses to your needs.
How secure is custom built software?
Hatchet always considers security first when developing your custom software. Widely used software such as operating systems and their packages are usually the priority of attackers and as a result are subject to constant security updates. Custom software receives less attention because it is closed source, we do not disclose your source code to the world and only you and whomever you grant access to has access to this code.
Hatchet use application frameworks such as Laravel which are peer reviewed and tested and offer out of box security for common vulnerabilities like cross site scripting and request forgery, SQL injection, permission elevation attacks and brute force attacks by throttling requests. We also use web application firewalls in some instances and we have a heavy focus on encrypting data in transit as well as at rest.
Is your software development team local?
We are strong believers that West Australian entrepreneurs & businesses should have access to local, world-class software development teams.
It’s unfortunate, in recent years the Perth market has been commoditised and outsourced. It’s resulted in a skill drain and inferior solutions being built for local services.
We’re bucking the trend. When you work with Hatchet, you’ll meet the team that writes the code and they’re never more than a phone call away. It’s as simple as that.
Do you work with non-for-profits or startups?
As a purpose driven organisation, the work we’ve done for startups and non-for-profits is amongst those we’re most proud of.
We understand how crucial it is for these organisations to be working with a flexible, trustworthy and responsive development team that won’t let costs and timeframes spiral and impact on their mission.
Are there any licensing costs associated with your work?
We are firm believers in open source software and as such we tend to stray away from any licenced solutions. As such there are no licencing costs to use the web server software that we primarily deploy, the database server software that hosts your database or the software that we use to build your application. There are no per-user licencing costs or per-CPU core licencing costs like in some other types of software.
In some projects, and depending on your requirements, you may wish to add in a package that manages your mailing lists where you still self-host it and don’t outsource it or a package that manages connecting the leads on your website to your CRM. These packages are generally developed by others and for us to integrate them we will quote you on what other developers are selling their software for either on a one off or a subscription basis.
What about ongoing or maintenance costs?
Your software is likely going to sit on a public cloud provider such as AWS or Azure or Google Cloud, to name a few. There are ongoing costs associated with storing your data here, running your web and database servers and storing your backups. There may be ongoing costs associated with SMS or Phone call credits, sending a very large volume or emails or hosting and streaming data heavy content such as video to thousands of users.
These costs are all dependent on what it is you want your software to do and we will do our best to estimate and provide you with a fixed fee based on your expected audience size. In some cases you may need to scale your application, and we can do that too. Your costs will scale with the amount of users and data you have in your application.
Maintenance is another aspect, and we generally recommend a particular number of hours are spent doing updates and maintaining of small 15 minute features or changes to your software each month. We will provide an estimate of the number of hours we expect to need each month, but these will always bank up as credits that expire 3 months later, so if you do very little maintenance to your application one month your credit will roll over to the following month. We will also give you an estimate of what we typically see our customers spending on applications of your size each month on developing new ideas and features that were not in the original scope. Once you are actively using your application you’ll immediately see the future possibilities and where you can take it, and have a lot of suggestions for new features to automate different parts of your business.
