If you can describe the workflow, we can build it.
Custom CRMs, AI chatbots, plugins, integrations and automation — engineered from scratch and built to fit your business, not the other way round.
Custom software and AI builds are scoped per project. Workflow automation starts at R5,000, a custom WordPress plugin at R6,500, an AI or WhatsApp chatbot at R12,000 plus R1,500 a month, and a custom CRM at R45,000. You get the source code and full ownership, with no per-seat licensing.
- Workflow automation
- from R5,000
- WordPress plugin
- from R6,500
- AI / WhatsApp bot
- from R12,000
- Custom CRM
- from R45,000
- Code ownership
- Yours
Custom CRM
Sales pipelines, lead scoring, automation engines, calendars, reporting and APIs — tailored to how your team actually sells.
AI chatbots
Assistants trained on your own content to handle support, qualify leads and answer customers 24/7 — embedded on your site.
Workflow automation
Connect the tools you already use and kill the repetitive manual work — quotes, onboarding, notifications, data sync.
WordPress plugins
Custom plugins and WooCommerce extensions for the feature off-the-shelf never quite delivers.
API & integrations
Tie systems together — POS to web, payment gateways, couriers, ERPs, third-party data.
AI content & ops systems
AI-assisted workflows for content, support and internal operations, built around your data and guardrails.
Indicative pricing
scoped per project · ZARCustom work is always scoped to a fixed price before anything starts — you'll know the number before you commit. Build time is shared up front and we check in at every milestone.
If you can describe the workflow, we can build it.
A pragmatic build process — scoped, prototyped where it helps, then shipped and supported.
Map the workflow
We map the process you want to build or automate, end to end, and define exactly what success looks like.
Scope & prototype
I scope a clear build and, where it helps, a quick prototype so you can see it before committing fully.
Build & integrate
Development, testing and integration with your existing tools, data and website.
Deploy & support
Shipped to production, documented, and supported — with options to extend as you grow.
Real systems, shipped — not slideware.
No vanity metrics — just real, defensible numbers from a decade of shipping and keeping systems alive.
Brands we've built, marketed and kept running.
A decade of work across healthcare, retail, manufacturing, hospitality and professional services — a selection of current and past clients.
— and more being added.
What we build most often
Custom software development in Cape Town usually comes down to a handful of recurring shapes. Here is what those actually are, what they do, and roughly what they cost.
Custom CRM — from R45,000
A sales system built around how your team already sells, rather than one you bend your process to fit. Pipeline stages you define, lead scoring on your own criteria, an automation engine for follow-ups and handoffs, calendar and timeline views, and reporting that answers the questions your sales meeting actually asks. Deployed to your subdomain, with a read-only API so other systems can pull from it.
Booking & scheduling systems
Availability rules, resource and staff allocation, deposits through a local gateway, automated reminders and a calendar the office can actually manage. These sit in the web app band, from R35,000, because the complexity is never the booking form. It is the double-booking rules, the cancellations and the reschedules.
Dashboards & internal portals
One screen that pulls numbers out of the three or four systems your team currently opens separately. Role-based access so a rep sees their accounts and a manager sees the branch. Client portals where customers check order status, download documents or log a job without emailing anyone. Also from R35,000, scoped on the number of data sources.
AI chatbots — from R12,000 + R1,500/mo
An assistant trained on your own content: your services, your pricing, your policies, your FAQs. It answers the repetitive questions, qualifies enquiries and captures details out of hours. Embedded on your site, with ongoing tuning and hosting on the monthly fee, because a bot that is never corrected gets worse over time.
Custom WordPress plugins — from R6,500
For the feature off-the-shelf never quite delivers. A WooCommerce shipping rule nobody sells, a product configurator, a custom quote flow, a data sync between your store and your back office. Built as a proper plugin so it survives theme changes and core updates, rather than pasted into functions.php.
Workflow automation — from R5,000
The repetitive manual work between systems. Quote to invoice, enquiry to CRM record, order to courier booking, form to onboarding sequence. Priced per automation or as a connected set. This is usually the cheapest way to get value out of custom work, and it is where we suggest most people start.
API and systems integration is quoted per project, because the cost sits in the other system rather than ours. Connecting a POS to a website, a payment gateway to an ERP, a courier to an order table, or a third-party data feed to a dashboard. We confirm feasibility during scoping, before you commit to a number.
Why WhatsApp automation matters here
WhatsApp is the default business communication channel in South Africa. Customers message it before they email you, phone you or fill in a form, and they expect a reply the way they expect a reply from a person.
That expectation is the problem worth solving. A small team cannot sit on a phone all day, so messages queue up, and a customer who waited four hours has usually already messaged a competitor. A WhatsApp Business API integration puts a system behind the number instead of a person holding a handset.
What the integration actually does
It connects your WhatsApp Business number to your own systems through an official API rather than a browser hack. That means messages can be answered automatically, routed to the right person, logged against a customer record, and triggered by events elsewhere. An order ships and the customer gets a message. A booking is confirmed and the reminder is scheduled. An enquiry arrives at 22:00 and it is already in the CRM by the time someone opens it.
What a bot should handle
The repetitive 70%. Opening hours, location and directions, order and delivery status, pricing ranges, availability, document requests, and qualifying questions that decide who a lead should go to. It should capture a name, a need and a contact detail, and write them somewhere useful, so no enquiry evaporates because it arrived after hours.
Where it must hand off to a human
This is the part most bot projects get wrong. A bot should hand over the moment a customer is upset, the moment a question involves money, a dispute, a medical or legal matter, or the moment it is unsure twice in a row. Handoff should be one tap, obvious, and always available. We build the escape hatch first and the automation second. A customer trapped in a decision tree is a customer you have lost, and they will tell people.
Consent and record keeping
WhatsApp is a personal channel, so consent and message retention are handled deliberately. People opt in, they can opt out in the conversation, and conversation logs are kept only as long as there is a reason to keep them. More on that below.
A WhatsApp assistant is scoped like any other chatbot, from R12,000 with R1,500 a month for hosting and tuning, and the number of message flows and connected systems moves the figure. Where it only needs to notify rather than converse, a workflow automation from R5,000 is often the honest answer.
When custom is the wrong answer
Custom software is the most expensive way to solve a problem, and it is not always the best one. We turn work down for these reasons regularly, and we would rather say it now than three weeks into a scope.
| Question | Spreadsheet | Off-the-shelf tool | Custom build |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typical cost | Effectively nothing | Monthly subscription, usually per seat | From R5,000 for an automation, from R45,000 for a CRM |
| Cost as the team grows | Flat, but it stops coping | Rises with every seat you add | Flat. No per-seat licensing. |
| Fits your process | Exactly, until it breaks | Roughly. You adapt to it. | Exactly, and it stays that way |
| Multiple users at once | Poorly, with no permissions | Handled well | Handled, with roles you define |
| Audit trail for POPIA | None | Depends on the vendor and where data sits | Built in, hosted where you choose |
| Time to running | Today | Days to weeks | Weeks to months, scoped up front |
| Choose it when | Low volume, one or two people, no compliance need | It already does 90% and the missing 10% is not what makes you money | The workflow is genuinely yours, or the integration does not exist |
Custom is the right call when the workflow is genuinely yours, when the tool you would otherwise buy charges per seat as you grow, when the data has to live somewhere you control, or when the integration you need does not exist. We will tell you which side of that line you are on during the free first consult, and we do not charge for the answer.
POPIA and your data
POPIA is the South African privacy framework. Not GDPR, not HIPAA. If a supplier is quoting you GDPR compliance for a system serving South African customers, they are quoting the wrong law.
The Protection of Personal Information Act governs how you collect, store, use and share personal information about people in South Africa. Section 19 requires you to secure the integrity and confidentiality of personal information through what it calls "appropriate, reasonable technical and organisational measures". That wording is deliberate. There is no certification to buy and no checklist that ends the obligation. What counts as reasonable scales with how sensitive the data is and how much damage a breach would do.
Since 1 April 2025, security compromise notifications go to the Information Regulator through its eServices portal. That changes what a breach costs you operationally: you need to know what data you hold, where it lives and who touched it, quickly enough to report it. Systems that were never designed with that question in mind make it an expensive week.
Data minimisation by design
We ask what each field is actually for during scoping. If nobody can name a use for a date of birth or an ID number, it does not go in the schema. The cheapest way to protect personal information is not to collect it. Retention windows are set at build time, not left as a someday task.
Real opt-in consent
Consent means a clear, specific, voluntary yes. Not a pre-ticked box, not consent buried in terms nobody reads, not a marketing list assembled from people who bought something once. Forms and chat flows are built so the consent record is stored with a timestamp and what exactly was agreed to, so you can show it later.
Disclosed cross-border transfers
Most modern systems send data somewhere. An email platform, an AI model provider, an analytics service, a cloud region outside South Africa. We document every one of those in the build so you know what leaves the country and can disclose it properly in your privacy notice, rather than discovering it during an enquiry.
Access control and audit trail
Role-based permissions so staff see only what their job needs, and a record of who changed or exported what. This is the practical half of "organisational measures", and it is also the difference between knowing what a breach touched and guessing.
Backups, encryption and hosting
Encrypted connections as standard, sensible handling of anything sensitive at rest, and tested backups. Load shedding makes backup and uptime a commercial risk here rather than a technicality, and cPanel and LiteSpeed hosting is home turf for us.
Documentation you can hand over
At handover you get a written note of what personal information the system holds, where it goes, who can reach it and how long it is kept. That document is what makes a breach notification a phone call instead of a forensic exercise.
We build systems that make compliance practical. We are developers, not attorneys, and none of the above is legal advice. For a formal compliance opinion, speak to someone qualified to give one.
It has to talk to what you already run, and you have to own it
Two things decide whether a custom build is an asset or a liability three years from now: whether it connects to everything else, and who controls it.
Almost nothing we build stands alone. A CRM that does not know about your orders is a second place to type things. So integration is scoped first, not bolted on. We work with whatever the other system exposes: a REST API, webhooks for events that need to fire immediately, scheduled syncs where near-real-time is not worth the cost, or a direct database read where it is yours to read. Payment gateways commonly used here, PayFast, Yoco, Ozow, PayGate, SnapScan and Peach Payments, are familiar territory.
A sales CRM, built from scratch
The clearest way to explain what "custom" means is to describe something we have actually built. This is the sales CRM, component by component.
The brief was a system that matched a real sales process rather than a generic one. Off-the-shelf CRMs impose their own stages, their own scoring and their own idea of what a follow-up is, and teams end up maintaining the CRM instead of using it. So the pipeline was built to configurable stages, with deals moving through the stages the business actually uses, and the fields limited to the ones a rep would genuinely fill in.
Pipeline, Gantt and calendar views
The same data, three ways. The pipeline view for a rep working deals today. A Gantt view for longer sales cycles where a deal is a sequence of dated commitments rather than a single stage. A calendar view for scheduling and follow-up load. Different roles ask different questions of the same records, and forcing everyone into one layout is how a CRM stops being used.
The automation engine
Rules built on triggers and conditions rather than hard-coded behaviour, so the business can change how the system behaves without a developer. A deal sits too long in a stage and it escalates. A stage changes and a task is created. A field is filled and a notification fires. This is the component that stops a CRM being a filing cabinet.
Lead scoring and round-robin routing
Scoring against criteria the business defines, so attention goes to the leads worth attention. Round-robin routing distributes new leads across the team evenly, with the rules visible rather than buried, which removes the argument about who got the good ones. Routing and scoring together answer the two questions every sales manager asks: who should have this, and does it matter.
Reporting and a read-only API
Reporting built around the questions the weekly sales meeting asks, not a dashboard of everything. The read-only API is the quieter feature and often the most useful one: it lets a website, a dashboard or another internal tool pull CRM data without being able to change it. Read-only by design, so an integration cannot corrupt the source of truth.
PHP and SQLite, deployable anywhere
Built to run on ordinary PHP hosting with SQLite behind it. No specialist stack, no managed service dependency, no monthly platform fee sitting under it. It deploys to a subdomain on hosting you already have, which keeps running costs near zero and keeps the data where you can point at it.
An interactive demo for stakeholders
A working demo with sample data, so decision makers can click through the thing itself instead of reading a specification. Approval conversations get much shorter when the people approving can see it work, and objections surface while they are still cheap to fix.
A build of that scope starts at R45,000 and is scoped to a fixed price before anything begins. We are not going to attach a client name or a percentage uplift to it here, because we do not publish numbers we cannot stand behind. What we will say is what it is: a complete sales system, built from nothing, owned outright by the business running it. That is the bar for "custom".
Custom & AI builds — the usual questions.
Can you build a WhatsApp chatbot?
Yes. WhatsApp is the default business channel in South Africa, so we build both WhatsApp Business API integrations and AI-backed chat flows that hand off to a human when they should. Chatbots start at R12,000 plus R1,500 a month.
What kinds of things can you build?
CRMs, dashboards, booking and portal systems, AI chatbots, workflow automations, WordPress plugins and API integrations.
Do I own the source code?
Yes u2014 you get the code and full ownership. No per-seat licensing, no lock-in.
Will it integrate with my current tools?
Usually, yes u2014 via APIs and webhooks. We confirm feasibility in the scoping call before anything is built.
Are AI chatbots actually reliable?
They're scoped to your content and use cases with guardrails u2014 not a free-roaming bot. Everything is tested before it goes live.
How is custom work priced?
Fixed scope wherever possible (e.g. CRM from R45,000, chatbot from R12,000 + R1,500/mo) or quoted for fully bespoke builds.
Do you maintain it after launch?
Yes u2014 an optional support retainer covers fixes, changes and enhancements as your needs evolve.
Is our data POPIA compliant?
POPIA u2014 not GDPR or HIPAA u2014 is the South African framework, and we build to it: data minimisation, disclosed cross-border transfers, and consent handled properly rather than a pre-ticked box.
We built a full sales CRM from scratch.
Pipeline, Gantt and calendar views, an automation engine, lead scoring, round-robin routing, reporting and a read-only API — deployable via PHP/SQLite, with an interactive demo to show stakeholders. That's the bar for "custom".
Tell me what you need — I'll reply within a day.
Send a quick enquiry below, or book your free first consult. No retainer traps, no jargon — just a clear scope and a fixed price.