Custom Software

Industrial reliability, open foundations

We build industrial software on open source. Lower licensing costs, no vendor lock-in, and the features that matter: reliability, maintainability, observability, and transparency.

Start with an assessment How we build
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 us help you define one

Start with an assessment, or send a scope you already have and we price it. After delivery we can support it.

  1. Scope

    Assessment

    $ 7,500 flat

    We work with you to understand your system, make recommendations, define a scope of work and give you a quote. Already have a scope? We can price that instead.

  2. Build

    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. Larger work is split into phases, each with its own number.

  3. Run

    Support plan

    from $ 1,000 / mo

    Pay by the hour, or subscribe to a plan that commits to a response time or lets us manage the system proactively. Priced by deployment shape, not by seat.

Prefer a monthly retainer? An embedded-team retainer puts us on your team by the month.

What it costs

What price can I expect?

Software needs vary widely, 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 no dependence on us. 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 a response commitment and the labor to put the system back the way we delivered it, 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
An edge that reports into a service.
Instance
A standalone instance with no central service.

A plan includes the labor to bring a covered service back to its baseline: the software we delivered, plus any improvement you have paid for since. That work is never billed by the hour under a plan. Anything else is new work, scoped and quoted as its own project: new features, changes you ask for, and software we did not deliver. Changes made outside our change process take the affected component out of coverage until it is re-validated, which is quoted the same way. If the labor a plan absorbs runs past its fee, the rate moves at renewal, never mid-term.

No plan at all is still an option: $ 350 an hour, answered typically inside 5 business days. Commitments are business hours; after-hours work bills at $ 525 an hour, $ 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.

  • Provider-agnostic. We build on Kubernetes, containers, MQTT, and web standards. We do not use proprietary services that lock you to one provider.
  • We support what we host. Cloud support is only for deployments we run ourselves, under Proactive Operations. We do not take over cloud environments we did not build.
  • Hosting is a flat monthly price that includes the infrastructure. Your price does not move with the provider bill.
Stackable coverage

Add-ons for software

Optional, per covered deployment, on any response tier.

  • 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

We publish some of our own tools, so you can read what we would put in your plant before you buy anything.

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.

Read the docs Source on GitHub
Start with an assessment
Request a quote

Tell us about your project

There is no list price. Software is quoted from the assessment against the bands above. Send the details and we'll follow up.