Web App & SaaS Development

Forty sellers, payments reconciled in spreadsheets. For months I could not get a straight answer on what marketplace development costs — everywhere it was an MVP first, six months, then we see. Here they built a single cart with split payments in 18 weeks. I did not sleep before launch because I was afraid the money would go to the wrong sellers. The first year brought 8.2 million hryvnias in turnover, although that is certainly not down to the site alone. And one more thing: they worked out when it would pay off instead of how many hours it takes, and talked us out of a cashback we did not need yet.

I take half a star off not for the site but for the API documentation — I had to drag it out of them, and then we spent a week repairing the warehouse integration because they changed the statuses a week before the finish. On the other hand the budget did not grow: costed at the start, and four months later the total was exactly that. We came in with a spreadsheet holding all our cargo and I had no idea what a dashboard like this costs. People use it every day now, and there are noticeably fewer calls asking where my cargo is.

We inherited an unfinished React app from a team that dropped the project halfway. They did not rewrite it from scratch and did not charge for one either — they took apart what was there and finished the dashboard we showed investors. Everyone else said not to touch somebody else’s code, so the fact that they agreed struck me as odd at the time. And one more thing: twice I was told that what I wanted was technically silly, and both times it turned out to be true.