Custom apps when off-the-shelf hits its ceiling.

Custom SaaS, internal dashboards, customer portals, API-first platforms. Built to spec on a stack chosen for the job.

SaaS works until it doesn’t.

The pricing breaks at 50 users. The integration the team needs isn’t on the roadmap. The data lives in three places. The vendor pushed a UI change that broke a critical workflow. The CSV export is paginated to 1,000 rows. Every growing business hits a moment where the off-the-shelf tooling stops being an asset and starts being a tax.

That’s when a custom build pays back inside a year. Orange County Design ships those builds — production-grade, documented, and handed off so a future engineer can read the code.

What gets built

Internal admin tools and operations dashboards — the back-office tooling that runs the business
Customer-facing portals and self-service flows — reduce support load, increase retention
API integrations between systems that don’t talk — the plumbing CRM, billing, and ops always need
Data pipelines and reporting layers — clean data into actionable reports, no spreadsheet bottleneck
Replatforming off SaaS that priced the team out — own the data, own the roadmap, own the margin

Stack defaults

TypeScript · Next.js · FastAPI · Postgres · Cloudflare · Stripe · Clerk

Stack defaults exist because they’re battle-tested. Different stacks get used when the project demands them — but the burden of proof is on the new tool, not the established one.

How a build runs

01. Discovery + Scoping Session — $2,500 flat fee, credited toward the build. Full discovery session that produces a written technical specification, milestone breakdown, and fixed-bid quote for Phase 1.

02. Phase-one MVP — Fixed bid against the scoping doc. Two to six weeks. Weekly demos. Real users testing by week three.

03. Phase-two iterations — Billed weekly. Scope reviewed each sprint. Either continues until the product hits its goals or hands off cleanly to the in-house team.

Pricing

Custom builds start at $50K. Every engagement begins with the $2,500 Discovery + Scoping Session — no quote without a written specification.

A note on engagement type

Custom software is fixed-fee or weekly-billed sprints, not hourly. For advisory sessions, scoping calls, and time-boxed consulting outside an active build, the rate is $225/hr.

What’s included

Production-grade code, not prototypes
Documentation handed over (architecture diagram + README + runbook)
Type-safe end-to-end where the stack supports it
Tests on the critical paths
Deployed and monitored — not just shipped to a Vercel preview URL
14 days of post-launch tweaks free