Software development in Cologne – when off-the-shelf doesn't fit

That depends entirely on the scope. An interface between two systems is often in the low four figures (euros), a complete business application with permission management, user interface and reports considerably more. After the preliminary conversation and the specification, you receive a reliable estimate, and for clearly defined projects a fixed price.

Yes. For custom-developed software, you receive the rights of use to the source code as well as the technical documentation. This means you are not tied to us and could hand over further development to another provider at any time.

Yes, both native and cross-platform. Which approach makes sense depends on the purpose: apps that make heavy use of device features such as the camera, GPS or offline storage we tend to develop natively; information-focused applications often cross-platform – which halves the effort.

In the vast majority of cases, yes. Modern ERP, CRM and inventory management systems provide interfaces. If no documented interface exists, there are usually other ways – via database access, file exchange or automated exports. We check this in advance, before we draw up a quote.

You usually see a first clickable prototype after two to four weeks. A smaller application goes live in eight to twelve weeks; larger projects run over several months. Because we deliver in stages, you can often use parts of the functionality before everything is finished.

Yes. Maintenance, bug fixing, adaptation to new requirements and updating of core components are part of what we offer. For this we either agree an ongoing maintenance contract or bill on a time-and-materials basis – depending on how critical the application is for your business.

Yes. This is currently one of the most common reasons clients come to us. It usually involves two directions: automatically reading in incoming invoices in XRechnung or ZUGFeRD format and passing them to accounting – and generating outgoing invoices from your inventory management system in the required format.

Check first whether your existing software can now do this itself. Often it is a question of the module or version, and then going through the vendor is cheaper than custom development.

A fair question for an owner-managed company. Three safeguards: the source code belongs to you and is handed over to you, not just kept by us. The documentation is written so that an outside developer can work with it. And we deliberately use widespread technology rather than niche solutions for which there are no specialists.

If you wish, we can also agree to deposit the source code with a third party (source code escrow).

Both, depending on how the project is structured. A clearly defined interface can be offered at a fixed price. For an application whose requirements will still become clearer along the way, a fixed price is false precision – it is either calculated with a large mark-up or leads to change requests.

Our usual approach: a fixed price for the concept phase, followed by a reliable estimate for implementation. After the concept phase, you can step out without any obligation and take the results with you.

You decide. We run applications on your own server on your premises, in a data centre in Germany or in your existing cloud environment.

For businesses with special requirements regarding where their data stays – law and tax firms, medical practices, suppliers with documentation obligations – running it on your own premises is often the simpler route, because a whole range of questions about data processing on your behalf (and the data processing agreement that goes with it) no longer arise.

Yes, and we deliberately build things so that this is possible. You receive the source code, the documentation and the access credentials. We will also actively hand over to a successor if you want to switch.

That is not a favour but self-interest: a client who stays because they can't leave is not a satisfied client.

We use language models where they reliably help – for example in analysing free text, suggesting categories or searching large document collections. What we don't do is build them into places where a wrong result would go unnoticed.

An important question here is where your data goes. For businesses with sensitive content, we look into running a model on your own premises – slower and less capable than the big providers, but the data never leaves the building.

Everything on this – AI chat on your own server, agents with an MCP server, document recognition and the introduction of Microsoft 365 Copilot – is on our Artificial Intelligence page.