SaaS does not fit your operation
Off the shelf tools have a workflow. Your business has a workflow. When they do not match, your team spends the day working around the software.
Custom Software Development
For growing businesses without an internal software development team. We build production web, mobile, and platform software with AI built in where it makes work faster, engineered so your operations and non technical team can maintain it without developer help.
The problem
Off the shelf tools have a workflow. Your business has a workflow. When they do not match, your team spends the day working around the software.
At 10 users it worked. At 500, queries slow, integrations break, and vendor pricing balloons. The rebuild costs more than starting right would have.
Most dev agencies and freelancers finish the scope and move on. Six months later documentation is missing, the code is fragile, every new feature is a rewrite. KUMO works as product engineers first. What we ship keeps working, keeps growing.
Every user flow can be faster with AI. Every internal workflow can automate the boring parts. Software shipped in 2026 without AI built in is already legacy.
Signs it's time
You don't need to check all of these. Any one of these is usually enough to start a conversation about what custom software could do for you.
Copying data between tools. Retyping the same information three times. Exporting to Excel to fix it. Custom software does that work automatically, so your team gets those hours back.
Every time Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, or your booking software cannot do something your team needs, that is a real business capability going unused. Custom software builds exactly what you need, when you need it.
Your CRM, your inventory tool, your accounting, your booking, your marketing platform. Every day someone on your team is moving data between them. One custom system that connects everything is cheaper monthly and fits how you actually work.
Performance is dropping, integrations are breaking, monthly costs are climbing as you add users. You are ready for the next stage: production software that scales with you instead of holding you back.
You do not need to wait for Zoho or QuickBooks to ship the right AI feature. Custom software lets you add AI where it matters most in your business: the workflows only your team knows about.
Your way of serving customers, running operations, and processing orders is what makes your business stand out. Custom software supports that. Off the shelf software forces you to work like everyone else.
Recognise one? That's the moment. Let's have a 30 min conversation.
Who we build for
Growing businesses across industries. If any of these sound like yours, we've likely built something similar.
Beyond Shopify or WooCommerce limits.
Inventory, POS, and ops across locations.
Patient flows, appointments, and records.
Listings, transactions, and owner portals.
Lending, wealth, remittance, non tech finance.
Tracking, dispatch, warehousing.
Booking, ops, guest experience.
Agencies, consultancies, and firms.
Not on the list? We build across sectors. Every project starts with your business, not our template.
Investment
Three ways to work with KUMO. Every engagement starts with a Starter Build: real production code, not a discovery deck.
$20K to $50K
Your first engagement with KUMO. Whether you're a founder building a new B2B or B2C product from scratch, or an established team fixing one specific workflow, we ship a working custom system end to end. You see how we work, we understand your business, and the output is real code you own, in production, doing a real job.
Typical timeline: 4 to 16 weeks. Right for a new product built 0 to 1, a first internal tool, a targeted automation, or replacing a workflow that slows your team down.
$50K to $100K
For growing businesses ready to scale. Full production build across multiple workflows, with integrations, admin, and the operational scaffolding your business will need at 10 times today's volume.
Typical timeline: 16 to 24 weeks. Fits marketplaces, customer portals, custom platforms, and AI powered workflows across the business.
$5K to $10K / month
Ongoing engineering team on retainer. Bug fixes, feature velocity, AI updates, monitoring, and quarterly architecture reviews. KUMO effectively becomes your part time engineering department.
For businesses after their Starter or Grow Build who want us to keep shipping. Comes with product help and support. Cancel anytime with 30 days notice.
Every engagement starts with a Starter Build. It's how we prove fit, and how you get real value from day one, not a diagnostic deck.
What's included
Regardless of tier, every custom build ships with the same standards. These are non negotiable at KUMO.
We understand your business, workflows, and users before writing any code. No black box quotes.
The engineers who scope the project are the engineers who ship the code. Zero junior handoff.
Every workflow gets reviewed for where AI can save time or add capability. Then we build it in.
Source code, deploy configs, documentation. All yours from day one, in your GitHub organisation.
So your team, or the next partner, can extend what we built. No lock in to KUMO.
Monitoring, tests, rollback, observability. Ready for real users, not just a demo.
Assembled per build
There is no single KUMO stack. Every build gets its own, assembled for your workload, your data, your team, and whoever maintains the system after handover. These are the technologies we assemble those stacks from, and why each earns its place.
TypeScript end to end for most products: one language across frontend and API cuts handover cost and hiring risk. Python where the workload is AI-heavy. Go where raw throughput decides the architecture, and Rust on hot paths where every millisecond is money. We run Node.js and adopt Bun where its speed pays. Our engineers shipped and scaled Ruby on Rails at Volopay, and we still support Rails codebases in production.
React and Next.js for web products. Astro for content-heavy sites where load speed is the feature. React Native with Expo for iOS and Android from one codebase, native modules where the product demands them. Tailwind CSS with shadcn/ui and Radix for design systems that ship fast. Real-time and streaming interfaces with WebSockets and server-sent events, because AI products that make users wait for a full response feel broken.
Two backend tracks, chosen per product. Convex for real-time serverless products: queries, mutations, actions, a scheduler, cron jobs, storage, and live subscriptions. Node.js services with Hono and typed oRPC over Postgres and Drizzle ORM for relational, retrieval-heavy products. Postgres is extended with pgvector for vector search and full-text search, so most AI features ship without a second database. Redis for caching and queues. Zod for end-to-end validation, Better Auth for authentication, and FastAPI or Supabase where they fit the job.
Model choice is an engineering decision, not a loyalty program. OpenAI GPT and Anthropic Claude for frontier reasoning, Google Gemini where multimodal or context length wins. Open-weight models, Llama, Mistral, DeepSeek, self-hosted when privacy or unit economics demand it. Specialist models where the product needs a specialist: ElevenLabs and dialogue-native TTS for production voice, Whisper for speech to text, dedicated embedding and reranking models for retrieval quality, image and vision models for documents and floor plans. Every model sits behind a provider-swappable abstraction, so switching is a configuration decision, not a rewrite.
AI features are built on the Vercel AI SDK and Convex Agent and RAG components: structured outputs, agentic tool use, streaming, and embeddings. Retrieval on pgvector by default, with Cohere reranking and Tavily web-search fallback, and managed vector stores like Qdrant at scale. Orchestration with LangGraph or custom code, tool connectivity over MCP, the protocol now standardising how AI systems talk to software. And the part that decides whether AI survives production: evals before ship, tracing in production, structured outputs, semantic caching, and model routing to control cost.
We deploy AI through AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, and Azure OpenAI where enterprise controls matter, direct APIs where speed matters, and vLLM or Ollama where self-hosting wins. Self-hosted GPU inference on RunPod with a scale-to-zero strategy, and image models through fal.ai. Media assembly and normalisation with FFmpeg.
AWS first: KUMO is an AWS Partner and runs its own SaaS, CampaignHQ, on AWS in production, with S3, EC2, CloudFront, and Route 53. Also Google Cloud, Azure, and client infrastructure including on-prem. Docker everywhere, Coolify and Kubernetes for deployment, serverless and edge where they fit. Monorepos on Turborepo, infrastructure as code with Terraform, background jobs on Trigger.dev, and delivery through GitHub Actions CI/CD.
Sentry for application errors, Langfuse for LLM traces, model metadata, and token usage, and OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing. End-to-end and AI-driven browser testing with Playwright. Cost, latency, and error tracking by workflow and model, so problems surface before customers see them.
Billing and payments with Stripe and Razorpay, subscriptions, webhooks, tax, and invoicing. Transactional email through Resend, team workflows over Discord, and the Google ecosystem, OAuth, Drive, and Sheets, wired in where products need it.
Timeline
A Starter Build ships in 4 to 16 weeks. A Grow Build follows the six phase timeline below.
Stakeholder interviews. Workflow mapping. Architecture calls with your team. Together we lock the scope, milestones, and payment plan for the whole engagement.
Compliance review. Pipeline design. Stack selection. First working software components come together. Weekly progress calls start here and continue through the whole build.
Core workflows go live. Backend and frontend integrate. AI workflows wired in. Each sprint closes with a working demo, sign off from your side, and a payment milestone released.
Integrations, admin panels, edge cases. UAT with your team. Same sprint rhythm as before: working demo, your sign off, milestone released, next sprint begins.
Production launch. Monitoring wired. Team training so your operations and non technical team is comfortable running the system before we step back.
Why KUMO
Most agencies ship the scope and move on. We build software your operations and non technical team can run for years, with AI built in where it makes the work faster. Product engineering first, service mindset never.
Selected work
Custom builds where the software was the business, not a side project. A small selection, we have shipped many more.
YC S20 fintech. First production version. 6 countries. Raised $31M+ after our build.
Read →Cloud native customer engagement platform we built, run, and operate. Live on G2 and Capterra. AWS Partner.
Read →Rental marketplace for a 25 year IT hardware leader. B2B and B2C. Payments, inventory, admin.
Read →How KUMO built Innergiving, a trust-first membership community for mental health. Ad-free, multi-sided marketplace.
Read →How KUMO built SmartMove, a UK real estate platform with real-time multi-party transaction tracking.
Read →If you specifically need web or mobile product work, see our web & mobile development page. Building an AI product for a regulated field like law, see AI legal automation.
How we deliver
Six phases. Milestone based, senior engineers from start to delivery. The same method behind every KUMO build.
Stakeholder interviews, workflow mapping, use-case prioritisation against business KPIs. Data quality validation. Risk register.
Data inventory across CRMs, ERPs, databases, and documents. Compliance review. Pipeline and ETL design. Model architecture decisions: RAG, fine-tune, or hybrid.
Rapid prototype with production APIs. Eval frameworks for accuracy, latency, cost-per-task. Stakeholder UAT. Honest go/no-go review.
Production engineering. Observability and tracing. Human-in-the-loop checkpoints. Versioning and rollback. Integration with your existing systems.
Phased rollout with control groups. KPI dashboards. Drift and latency alerts. Team training. Operational runbook handed over.
Ongoing support and maintenance: bug fixes, security patches, monitoring, and dependency upgrades as new versions ship, so your product stays stable and supported as you grow.
Common questions
Custom software development is building an application shaped around a specific business's workflow, users, and data, instead of adapting an off the shelf SaaS product. It costs more upfront but scales past vendor limits, gives you full IP, and fits how you actually work.
When your workflow has rules SaaS vendors do not support, when your data model is a competitive asset, or when you are spending 15 or more hours a week working around your current tool. If SaaS solves 80% of the problem cleanly, buy SaaS.
Typical range at KUMO is $20K to $50K for a Starter Build (real production code, not a diagnostic), $50K to $100K for a Grow Build across multiple workflows, and $5K to $10K per month for the Support and Growth Team retainer.
Your first engagement with KUMO is always a real build, not a diagnostic deck. We pick one specific workflow in your business, scope it end to end, and ship it as production code you own in 4 to 16 weeks. You see how we work, we understand your business, you get real value from day one.
You do. Full transfer from day one: source code, infrastructure as code, docs, deploy configs. No license locked components. No back doors. Repos are in your GitHub organisation from day one.
Straight handover. Your team gets the repos, runbooks, docs, and a 2 week overlap where our engineers are on Slack answering questions. Most clients do this at month 6 to 9 post launch.
Optional monthly engagement, $5K to $10K depending on team size and volume. Covers bug fixes, feature velocity, AI updates, monitoring, performance work, and quarterly architecture reviews. Comes with product help and support so you can keep shipping without hiring internal engineers. Cancel anytime with 30 days notice.
Stack pragmatic. TypeScript, Python, and Go as defaults. React, Next.js, Astro, React Native on the client. Postgres, Redis, and managed cloud on the server. We pick based on your team, your future maintenance plan, and the workload, not our preferences.
Global team operating from Bengaluru, India, with active engagements across the US, UK, EU, and the Middle East. We align 4 or more hours of overlap with your team's core working hours.
30 minutes, no pitch deck. You describe the software, we talk you through fit, rough scope, and roughly what it costs.