Question 1

What does OrcaScale actually do?

Accepted Answer

We build custom AI-powered business systems for growing companies — bespoke software designed around how your business actually works, not how a SaaS tool wants you to work. Internal operations apps, customer portals, dashboards, automation pipelines, AI workflows, custom websites. One product, one system, one team behind it. The defining thing: we build a working version before you commit, and you only pay milestones once it does what we said it would.

Question 2

Who is this for?

Accepted Answer

Growing SMEs and operators who have outgrown spreadsheets, hit the limits of off-the-shelf SaaS, or are losing time and money to manual work that obviously should be automated. We work most often with hospitality, construction, professional services, e-commerce, events and creator-led businesses — but the pattern is the same everywhere: too much manual work, not enough infrastructure. If you are doing the same thing in three different spreadsheets and your team keeps asking "is this the latest version", that is us.

Question 3

Why not just buy an off-the-shelf SaaS tool?

Accepted Answer

If an off-the-shelf tool genuinely fits, buy it. We will tell you to. We are not interested in building you something that already exists for £29/month. What SaaS does not do well: glue together your specific workflow when it crosses three departments and four data sources, model the bits of your business that make you different from your competitors, or change shape as you grow. That is when custom is worth it.

Question 4

Where are you based?

Accepted Answer

UK-based, working with clients across the UK, EU and US. All work, all support, all engineering — done by us, in-house. No offshoring, no rotating contractor pool, no agency middleman.

Question 5

How is this different from hiring a developer or an agency?

Accepted Answer

A freelance developer typically writes the code you specify. An agency typically sells you a process. We do both ends of the engagement — the strategic design (what the system should actually be) and the build (the working software) — and we anchor it on a working demo before any large invoice goes out. The other practical difference: we bake AI into the workflow as a first-class building block, not as a chatbot bolted onto the side.

Question 6

What are the main things I can buy from you?

Accepted Answer

Four, broadly: • Internal systems — the thing your team runs on behind a login. Job tracking, operations dashboards, internal CRMs, scheduling, quoting, automated reporting. Multi-user with role-based access. • Customer-facing portals — booking, quoting, ordering, job tracking, document hubs. Your customers serve themselves instead of ringing you. • Multi-department systems — deeper builds that integrate with your existing ERP, accounting, comms and identity stack, with SSO, compliance layers and a phased rollout. • AI features — bolted onto any of the above. Document processing, AI quoting, anomaly detection, forecasting, support that answers from your data. Prices are not published because the work is not off the shelf. You get a fixed price against a written scope once we both understand what is being built — see the services page for how that runs.

Question 7

Tell me more about the free build.

Accepted Answer

You spend ten minutes at /builder describing how your operation actually runs today — the process, where the time goes, what you use now, who needs access. Ed reads every application himself. If it is a fit, he builds a working demo of your system and walks you through it on a call, usually within 3–7 days. It is a real running system you click through, not a slide deck or a design mock-up. If it misses, you walk away owing nothing and you keep the written requirements to take elsewhere. He only takes on a few free builds a month, so not every application gets one — it is how he decides which projects he can do properly, and it cuts both ways.

Question 8

What goes into an internal system?

Accepted Answer

This is for internal teams: dashboards, workflow tools, CRMs, scheduling, reporting, anything that lives behind a login and runs your operation day to day. Multi-user, role-based access, real-time data, audit logging, mobile-friendly out of the box. AI features are extra and priced individually. Typical examples: a job-tracking system for a construction firm, a service-pipeline CRM for a consultancy, a kitchen ops board for a hospitality group, a master roster system like the one we built for Tim (see case studies).

Question 9

What does adding a customer portal involve?

Accepted Answer

Everything in the internal app, plus a customer-facing portal. Your customers can self-book, self-quote, self-track, place orders, upload documents, see their history — without you in the loop. Reduces inbound load enormously and makes the customer experience materially better. Typical examples: a B2B order portal, a client document hub, a "track my job" portal for trades, a course portal for educators, a member area for a community.

Question 10

What about larger, multi-department systems?

Accepted Answer

Multi-department systems with deep integrations into existing infrastructure, multiple AI agents working in concert, white-glove rollout, training, SSO, audit and compliance layers (SOC2, GDPR, sector-specific), and a longer engagement model. Suited to teams of 25+ where the system is replacing several tools and integrating with your existing ERP, accounting, comms and identity stack.

Question 11

What can the AI features actually do?

Accepted Answer

These are real workflow features, not chatbots. Examples: • Document processing — invoices, receipts, contracts, statements parsed and pushed into the right system. • AI quoting — generates priced quotes from a customer brief. • Anomaly detection — flags unusual transactions, missing data, out-of-range values. • Decision support — surfaces the next action a team member should take. • Predictive analytics — forecasts demand, churn, cashflow. • Content generation — emails, reports, listings, social posts in your tone. • Support bots — answer real customer questions from your docs and your data, not the public internet. Each is scoped and priced individually, because two features that share the same data and plumbing cost less together than they would apart.

Question 12

Can I see something you have actually built?

Accepted Answer

Yes — see /case-studies. The most recent live example is the OrcaScales event speaker operations platform built for Tim — a custom build that replaced six out-of-sync spreadsheets with a single system powering five different operational views. You can poke around the live demo at tim.orcascale.co.

Question 13

How are projects priced?

Accepted Answer

Mostly fixed-fee against a written scope, with milestone payments. We give you a clear quote line-by-line after we have understood the scope — no daily rates running on a meter, no surprise change orders. We do not publish price tiers, because a number without a scope is meaningless — two systems that sound identical in a sentence can differ by a factor of five once you look at the integrations and the edge cases. You get a real figure once the scope is written down, and the free build happens before any of that.

Question 14

When do I actually pay?

Accepted Answer

In milestones, against a written agreement. Critically: you do not pay the main build cost until we have shown you the working version doing what we said it would. The free demo (3–7 days) comes before any meaningful invoice. Final payment lands at sign-off after the 14-day review window. Specifics get written into the agreement before you commit — you will not be surprised by a payment schedule.

Question 15

What about the 14-day review?

Accepted Answer

After we hand over the production system, you get 14 days to use it in anger and tell us anything that does not match the agreed scope. Anything in scope, we fix free. Anything genuinely new becomes either a small change-request or a care plan task — but you will know which it is, in writing, before any extra invoice goes out.

Question 16

Are third-party costs (hosting, APIs, AI tokens) included?

Accepted Answer

No, and we strongly recommend you pay these directly. You set up accounts in your own name with your card on file (Stripe, OpenAI/Anthropic, Twilio, Postmark, hosting, etc.) and we configure the system against them. That way: you own the accounts, you see exact usage, you can switch providers, and there is no agency markup. Where it makes sense (very small AI usage, simple email, low-traffic hosting) we can route through ours and pass through at cost — but the default is direct billing to you.

Question 17

Will I know what those third-party costs will look like?

Accepted Answer

Yes. We give you a realistic running-cost estimate for hosting, AI usage and any APIs as part of the proposal. For most internal apps we build, infrastructure runs in the low tens of pounds per month; AI-heavy systems vary with usage but we cap them sensibly so a runaway loop cannot rack up a £4,000 bill overnight.

Question 18

Do you offer payment plans?

Accepted Answer

For larger builds, yes — we can split into more than the standard milestones. Talk to us; we are not the bottleneck.

Question 19

Do I have to take a care plan after the build?

Accepted Answer

No. The system is yours. We will hand it over fully documented and you can run it yourself, hire someone else, or pick a care plan. Most clients pick a care plan because they want one team that knows the system and can keep it moving, but that is a choice, not a lock-in.

Question 20

What does the care plan actually cost?

Accepted Answer

It is quoted against your system rather than off a price list, because what a care plan has to cover depends on what got built — how many integrations it leans on, how much AI is in it, how many people use it. There are three shapes: a monthly plan on an annual commitment, the same on a quarterly commitment at a higher rate, or purely ad-hoc at an hourly rate billed in 15-minute increments with no minimum. You get the actual numbers with your build quote, before you commit to anything, and the plan is optional either way.

Question 21

What is included in the care plan?

Accepted Answer

Roughly speaking: hosting management and uptime monitoring, security patches and dependency updates, small UI/copy/data changes, a regular pool of build hours for new features, priority support, and a quarterly review where we look at what is working and what could be sharper. Specific scope is written into your care plan agreement — different clients use it differently. Some use it as an evolution budget, others as insurance.

Question 22

What about ongoing AI integrations specifically?

Accepted Answer

Each AI integration carries a small additional monthly amount on top of the care plan. That covers prompt monitoring and tuning, model usage oversight, evaluation against drift, prompt versioning, and adjustments as the model providers update their APIs. AI features need looking after differently from regular code — pricing reflects that.

Question 23

Who owns the code, the data and the system?

Accepted Answer

You do. Always. The codebase is yours, the data is yours, the database is yours, the integrations are configured against your accounts. If you ever decide to leave, we hand over keys and walk away. No held-ransom code, no proprietary lock-in layer.

Question 24

Can I edit the system myself or hire someone else later?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Code is delivered in standard frameworks (Node/Express, React, PostgreSQL — nothing exotic) with documentation and commented logic. Any competent developer or agency can pick it up. If you want us to hand over directly to your in-house team, we will run a session to walk them through the architecture.

Question 25

What if you go away or get hit by a bus?

Accepted Answer

Reasonable question. Source code lives in a Git repository you have access to from day one. Database is hosted on standard infrastructure (PostgreSQL on a major provider) you can access directly. Documentation lives with the code. If we vanished tomorrow, your system would carry on running and any developer in the world could pick it up.

Question 26

What systems can you integrate with?

Accepted Answer

Anything with a sensible API. The ones we touch most often: • Accounting — Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, FreeAgent. • CRM & sales — HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Close, Attio. • Calendars & scheduling — Google Calendar, Microsoft 365, Calendly, Cal.com. • Comms — Slack, Teams, Twilio (SMS/WhatsApp), SendGrid, Postmark, Resend. • Payments — Stripe, GoCardless, PayPal. • Storage & docs — Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, S3. • Auth — Google, Microsoft, Apple, Okta, custom SSO. • AI — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, open-source models (Llama, Mistral) for sensitive workloads. • E-commerce — Shopify, WooCommerce, custom carts. • Sector-specific — booking systems (Mews, Cloudbeds), construction (Procore), legal (Clio), healthcare (sector-compliant providers). If it has an API, we can usually get to it. If it does not, we sometimes build a careful screen-scrape — but we will tell you the trade-offs first.

Question 27

What if my system has no API?

Accepted Answer

We have options. Sometimes a careful, monitored automation against the web UI; sometimes a CSV import/export bridge; sometimes a small custom adapter. We will be honest about the fragility of each route — automations against UIs break when vendors redesign their pages, and that needs to be a conscious trade-off.

Question 28

Can it pull data from my existing systems and push to them?

Accepted Answer

Yes — read and write, both directions, where the API allows it. We frequently set up two-way sync (e.g. quotes created in our system automatically posted to HubSpot; invoices in Xero pulled in to a cashflow dashboard).

Question 29

How do you handle auth into our existing stack?

Accepted Answer

OAuth where the vendor offers it (the standard for HubSpot, Xero, Google, Microsoft, etc.) — that means no shared passwords and you can revoke access at any time. API tokens stored encrypted at rest. Service accounts where appropriate. You retain control.

Question 30

How quickly can I see something working?

Accepted Answer

The first working demo lands within 3–7 days of you signing off scope. That is a real running system you can click through, not a slide deck or a Figma frame. You only pay milestone money once you have seen it work.

Question 31

How long does the full production build take?

Accepted Answer

Depends on size: • Free-first website — the free build lands in days; typically 5–10 working days from brief to fully live once you say yes. • Internal Web App — typically 2–4 weeks from kickoff to production. • Internal + Portal — typically 4–8 weeks. • Enterprise — typically 8–16 weeks, milestone-driven. We would rather quote a timeline we can beat than one we have to apologise for. Honest dates go in the agreement.

Question 32

How long is the full process end to end?

Accepted Answer

Seven steps: (1) intake call, (2) scope and proposal, (3) free demo built (3–7 days), (4) demo review and refinement, (5) production build and milestone reviews, (6) handover and 14-day review window, (7) ongoing care plan or hand-off. Steps 1–3 take about a week. Steps 4–6 take the bulk of the calendar.

Question 33

Can you do urgent / rush builds?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes. If a deadline is real (an event, a launch, a regulatory date), tell us about it on the first call. We can occasionally prioritise — there is sometimes a small premium attached but we will be transparent about it. We will not promise a date we do not believe.

Question 34

How available are you during the build?

Accepted Answer

You get a direct channel (email, WhatsApp or Slack — your call) and same-working-day response on anything blocking. Weekly written updates on progress, demo links pushed as we go, and milestone reviews scheduled in advance. You should never wonder where your project is.

Question 35

Can you white-label for an agency?

Accepted Answer

Yes. We work behind several agencies and consultancies who sell custom software to their own clients. We stay invisible — you keep the relationship, we deliver the build, your client never knows we exist unless you want them to. Standard NDA, standard agency-friendly contracts, no surprise contact with your clients.

Question 36

Can we partner on referrals?

Accepted Answer

Yes — we run a referral arrangement for partners who consistently send qualified leads (consultants, agencies, fractional CTOs, accountants, vertical specialists). Get in touch and we will share the structure.

Question 37

Can you work alongside our existing dev team?

Accepted Answer

Yes. We are happy to specify, build a prototype, then hand over to your team to maintain. Or build alongside them as a pair. Or take on a defined slice while they handle the rest. Whatever shape works — we have done all three.

Question 38

Can you take over a stalled or failed build from another agency?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and we have done this several times. We will start with a paid technical audit (small, fixed fee) so we can give you an honest read on what is salvageable, what should be rewritten, and what it would cost. Sometimes the right answer is to keep going with what you have; sometimes the right answer is a clean rebuild. We will tell you which.

Question 39

Do you do consulting separate from building?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Some clients hire us purely for advisory — system architecture, AI strategy, build-vs-buy decisions, technical due diligence on a vendor or acquisition target. That is charged at an hourly rate or as a small fixed-fee engagement, quoted before we start.

Question 40

How do I know you can actually deliver?

Accepted Answer

Three concrete things, not three adjectives: • You see a working demo of your system within 3–7 days, before you commit serious money. If the demo is wrong, you walk and pay nothing. • You can poke around live builds we have already shipped — the OrcaScales event ops platform at tim.orcascale.co, this very site, and the case studies at /case-studies. • Milestone payments mean you are never paying ahead of delivery.

Question 41

How do you handle security?

Accepted Answer

Security in from day one, not bolted on at the end. Standard practice on every build: • Encryption in transit (TLS) and at rest. • Role-based access control with audit logs of who did what, when. • Authenticated APIs with short-lived tokens. • Secrets stored in managed vaults — never in code, never in git. • Dependency scanning and patching as part of the care plan. • Sensible password policies, optional 2FA / SSO. For regulated sectors (legal, financial services, healthcare) we add the relevant compliance layers — SOC2-aligned controls, GDPR documentation, sector-specific (e.g. FCA, HIPAA-aligned) controls as part of the scoping.

Question 42

Are you GDPR compliant?

Accepted Answer

Yes. We handle data per UK GDPR — data processing agreement available on request, defined retention windows, right-to-erasure flows built into systems where personal data is held, EU/UK-region hosting available where you need it. We are not lawyers, so where the question is "can we legally do X with this data" we will point you to one — but the technical infrastructure is set up so the legal answer can be honoured.

Question 43

Will I get a proper contract?

Accepted Answer

Yes — written agreement covering scope, payment milestones, IP ownership (yours), confidentiality, support terms and exit. Standard, plain-English. We can sign your paper or you can sign ours. Whichever is faster.

Question 44

What happens if something is broken in production?

Accepted Answer

If you are on a care plan, you have a same-working-day SLA on critical issues and we get on it immediately. If you are not on a care plan, we still respond — at our hourly rate — and we will not leave you stranded with a broken system. We have never refused to fix something we built.

Everything you'd ask before you book