Custom Software

Industrial reliability, open foundations

We build industrial software on the shoulders of open source giants. Minimize licensing costs, escape vendor lock-in, and optimize for truly valuable features: reliability, maintainability, observability, and transparency.

What we build

Industrial software, end to end

SCADA (PLC & HMI)

Run traditional control systems on open foundations as real software applications built with modern open tools, with no licensing tax and no vendor lock-in.

IIoT & data pipelines

Expose plant data from your existing systems to NATS, MQTT, or Zenoh where your other services can consume it.

Integrations

Use industrial protocols to integrate with your existing systems without expensive proprietary drivers.

Cloud platforms

Let us help you build applications everyone in your team can securely access, such as historians, dashboards, and analytics in the cloud, built on an architecture you can use with any provider. How we keep cloud portable.

Modernization

Nobody wants to rip-and-replace their entire platform. Incrementally replace a brittle, licensed platform with an auditable open stack.
What you buy

Give us a scope or let's help you define one

If you need help we can start with an assessment or we can hit the ground running by pricing a scope you already have. Afterward we can provide support if you need it.

Assessment

$ 7,500 flat

We work with you to understand your system, make recommendations, define a scope of work and give you a quote.

Fixed-bid build

Fixed bid, by phase

We give you a price to build the system, usually the price of a system integrator minus the licensing fees.

Support plan

from $ 1,000 / mo

You can either pay for support by the hour or subscribe to a plan that includes response commitments or even proactive management.

Would a monthly retainer suit you better? An embedded-team retainer puts us inside your engineering org by the month instead.

What it costs

What price can I expect?

Software needs widely vary, so we price each project individually. However, below are some bands to give you an idea of what to expect.

Common application pricing

  • Edge gateway or protocol conversion

    3 to 10 days

    $ 8,400 to $ 28,000

    One edge computer, Linux, and the conversion logic you need, tested and shipped. The box itself is on top, at cost plus 20%. Once running, it is a distributed instance under software support.

  • Integration or data pipeline

    10 to 20 days

    $ 28,000 to $ 56,000

    Getting plant-floor data somewhere useful, or making two systems talk that were never meant to.

  • Cloud platform

    15 to 40 days

    $ 42,000 to $ 112,000

    Standing up or migrating the cloud side: historians, dashboards, and analytics, plus the link from the plant floor that feeds them.

  • Line or cell SCADA

    25 to 50 days

    $ 70,000 to $ 140,000

    Replacing a licensed HMI or SCADA layer for one line or work cell, screens included.

  • Site-wide platform

    50 to 125 days

    $ 140,000 to $ 350,000

    A full monitoring, control, and data layer for a plant, running alongside the old system until it is trusted.

  • Multi-site

    125+ days

    $ 350,000+

    Quoted from the assessment. Too dependent on your footprint to band honestly.

What affects pricing

  • How well the existing system is documented Undocumented tag databases and PLC logic increase the amount of time it takes to understand the system and bid it.
  • How many protocols and controllers are in scope Pretty self explanatory. More protocols and more controllers equals more work.
  • Do you need your old data migrated to the new system Migrating years of historian data can be particularly time-consuming.
  • How long the old system runs in parallel Running systems together is the most reliable way to reduce downtime, but it increases complexity.
  • Whether the process is regulated Validation, audit trails, and formal test evidence are real work.

Terms

  • If the scope grows mid-project, we price the change and get your approval before doing the work. No surprise invoices.
  • At delivery you get an unrestricted license to the source: use it, modify it, redistribute it, with nothing that depends on us still being here. We retain ownership so we can keep building on it for every client.
  • Payment is milestone-based against phases that we'll define in the proposal. Typically 50% upfront, 25% on completion, and 25% on fully tested delivery plus documentation
Once it runs

Software support rates

Pay by the hour, or subscribe to a plan that includes response commitments or let us proactively manage the system for you.

Deployment shapePriority ResponseProactive Operations
On premise, distributed$ 1,000 + $ 250 / instance / mo$ 2,500 + $ 250 / instance / mo
On premise, hub and spoke$ 1,000 / service + $ 250 / edge / mo$ 2,500 / service + $ 250 / edge / mo
Cloud, we host itNot offered$ 2,500 / service + $ 250 / edge / mo
Service
The central application. The hub.
Edge
Reports into a service. A spoke.
Instance
Stands alone, no central service.

No plan is $350/hr with a response typically inside 5 business days. Commitments are business hours; after-hours work bills at $525/hr, $700 on weekends and holidays.

Cloud

Let us host it

If your application needs to be publicly accessible, we can host it for you. We manage the service and the edges, and you pay a flat monthly price that includes the infrastructure.

  • Portable by construction. We build on cloud provider agnostic platforms and protocols. Kubernetes, containers, MQTT and web standards. We do not use proprietary services that lock you in to a single provider.
  • We host what we support. Cloud support is exclusively for deployments we run ourselves, under Proactive Operations. We do not take over cloud environments we did not build and do not control.
  • Hosting is a flat monthly price with the infrastructure inside it. It's on us to deploy cloud resources as efficiently as possible and your price does not move based on the provider bill.
Stackable coverage

Add-ons for software

Optional, per covered deployment, on any response tier.

  • Extended Stabilization, from $ 3,500 / yr. For systems you operate yourself: drift away from your as-built configuration is corrected at no charge for the covered year. Included in Proactive Operations, where staying at as-built is our job.
  • Annual Stack Upgrade, from $ 8,000 / yr. One major-version upgrade a year across runtime, database, and messaging, tested and cut over in a maintenance window. This is what keeps custom software from aging out. Included in Proactive Operations.

Runbooks and a reproducible build are part of every delivery, under the same unrestricted license.

Third party

Licenses and hardware we procure

Provided under any project at cost plus a 20% margin, itemized as its own line, the same way our bills of materials show it. The margin is identical whoever we buy from, so nothing about what we specify depends on which vendor discounts hardest. We pick on fit.

Applies to anything on a bill of materials, from PLC hardware to SCADA licenses.

Tech stack

Open foundations

We build on tools you can audit, host, and keep.

  • Go
  • SvelteKit frontends
  • Python
  • Deno & TypeScript
  • IEC 61131-3 control logic
  • EtherNet/IP, Modbus, OPC-UA
  • Sparkplug B & MQTT
  • NATS & GraphQL
  • Postgres & TimescaleDB
  • Kubernetes & containers
Open source

We build the foundations too

It is easy to say you prefer open tools. We publish some of them, which means you can read the thing we would put in your plant before you buy anything at all.

nautilus

SCADA as software

A Go and SvelteKit toolkit for building control and supervisory systems the way software engineers already work: version control, tests, code review, CI/CD. Write control logic in IEC 61131-3 or in native Go, run it on a deterministic scan loop, and ship it like any other binary. It includes a pure-Go EtherNet/IP stack for Allen-Bradley Logix, Sparkplug B, and a VS Code extension.

Request a quote

Tell us about your project

No list price and no configurator: software is quoted from the assessment, against the published bands. Send the shape of the thing and we'll follow up.