Your data is yours, and exportable
In a documented format, on request, without a fee and without a support ticket. A platform that is hard to leave is not the same thing as a platform worth staying on.
Approach
Every stage ends in something you can hold.
Software projects go wrong quietly and are discovered late. The defence is that each stage produces a written artefact — so stopping after any one of them still leaves you with something useful, and so disagreement surfaces on paper rather than in a demo three months in.
The sequence
Scope, design, build, run.
01
Scope
We map the work as it runs today — the steps, the handoffs, who is accountable at each one, and the places it currently breaks. Mostly this is asking questions and reading what you already have.
02
Design
Data model, access model, and the screens. Agreed before anything is built on top of them, because these are the three decisions that are expensive to change afterwards and cheap to change now.
03
Build
Shipped in increments to an environment you can log into and use with your own data. Not demoed from a laptop — you should be able to try to break it before anyone depends on it.
04
Run
We operate and maintain it, or hand it over with the documentation and access to run it yourself. Either way it is a decision made deliberately and written down, not a default you discover later.
Working rules
What we hold to.
Not a philosophy. These are the specific commitments that tend to matter most when the system has been running for a year and nobody remembers why it was built that way.
Security is in the first release
Access control, an audit trail and backups are part of the initial build, not a phase two. Retrofitting them means touching every screen twice and trusting that nothing was missed.
A number that cannot be checked is not shipped
Any figure a report shows can be traced to its source. Where a total cannot be reconciled the report says so, rather than presenting a plausible number that disagrees with your invoice.
We say when we are the wrong answer
Some of what people arrive asking for is a spreadsheet used properly, a setting in a product they already pay for, or a process change. We would rather tell you that in week one.
Scale
Deliberately small.
Piton is a small shop and does not pretend otherwise. That is a real constraint and it is worth being plain about which side of it your project falls on.
Where we do our best work
One organisation's operations, understood properly and built to fit. Regulated or reconciliation-heavy work where correctness matters more than feature count. Long relationships where the same people keep maintaining what they built.
Where you want somebody else
Large multi-team programmes with fixed delivery dates set before scoping. Staff augmentation into an existing team. Anything that needs a 24/7 support desk from day one. We would rather refer it than take it.
Start here
Start with a scope.
It is the smallest useful commitment: a clear description of the work, and a fixed price for building it. Yours to take elsewhere if you would rather.