Finding a UK software company that takes small jobs

There is a particular kind of small problem that businesses live with for years.

A report that has to be exported and reformatted by hand every Monday. A form that asks for the wrong thing, so somebody corrects it afterwards. A field that should have been added in 2019. None of it is broken enough to be urgent, and all of it is annoying enough to be mentioned every few weeks.

The reason it never gets fixed is rarely that nobody has noticed. It is that the job feels too small to ask about, and the last time somebody asked, the answer came back as a meeting invitation.

Why small jobs are genuinely hard to buy#

It is worth understanding this properly, because the usual explanation is that agencies are greedy, and that is not really what is going on.

A development agency with staff has a fixed monthly cost that does not care how big your job is. Salaries, an office, account managers, project managers, sales people. To cover that, the work has to arrive in large enough pieces, and every job carries the same overhead regardless of size: a call to scope it, a proposal, a project set up, someone to manage it, an invoice raised, a payment chased.

If that overhead is two thousand pounds of internal cost, a four hundred pound job loses money. So the minimum engagement exists for a real reason. It is arithmetic rather than attitude.

The same arithmetic explains the retainer. A monthly fee smooths the overhead across the year, which suits the supplier, and it is why so many quotes for a small change come back as a proposal for an ongoing relationship.

None of that is dishonest. It is a business model that has a floor, and your job is below it.

What to look for instead#

The thing that makes small jobs possible is not goodwill. It is a supplier whose overhead per job is small enough that a small job still works.

In practice that means checking four things, and all four can be checked before you speak to anybody.

Are prices published? A supplier who publishes prices has already done the estimating work in advance, which is most of the overhead removed. It also means you can find out whether you can afford them without a phone call, which is the thing that stops most people asking.

Is there a minimum? Look for it explicitly. Many sites do not say, and the absence is usually a yes. A supplier who takes small work tends to say so plainly, because it is the thing that distinguishes them.

How does a job start? If the first step is a discovery call, the overhead is still there and you are paying for it somewhere. If the first step is describing the job in writing and getting a price back, it is not.

Is there a contract to sign before anything happens? A retainer, a minimum term or a notice period all mean the supplier needs your commitment in order to make the economics work. That is a legitimate model. It is the wrong one for a job that takes half a day.

Questions worth asking#

If a supplier gets past those four, five questions will tell you the rest. None of them are technical.

1. What is the smallest job you have done this month? A supplier who takes small work will have an answer ready and it will be specific.
2. Will I get a price before anything starts, in writing? The follow up matters more: does the price move if it takes longer than you thought?
3. Who actually does the work? With small jobs, being passed through an account manager is most of the cost.
4. What happens if I only ever have two jobs a year? Listen for whether that is described as a problem.
5. What do I keep if we stop working together? Ask it now, while nothing is wrong. The accounts should be in your name from the start rather than handed over at the end.

The thing that changes the economics#

Fixed pricing sounds like a customer-friendly gesture. It is really a different operating model, and it is what makes small work possible at all.

When a job is priced before it starts and the price does not move, several costs disappear at once. Nobody records time. Nobody reconciles time against an estimate. Nobody has the conversation where the estimate has been exceeded and somebody has to decide who pays. That conversation is expensive for both sides, and avoiding it is worth more than it appears.

It also moves the risk. If the work takes twice as long as the supplier thought, that is their problem rather than an amended invoice. Which, incidentally, is the strongest reason to trust the estimate: a supplier who carries their own misjudgements gets accurate quickly, because there is nowhere else for the mistake to go.

Do not pay for a small job in meetings#

The hidden cost of a small change is almost never the work. It is everything arranged around the work.

A half-day change that requires a scoping call, a follow-up call, a proposal, a kick-off and a review has consumed several times its own value before anybody opened a code editor. You will pay for that, whether it appears on the invoice as consultancy or is absorbed into a larger number.

So a fair test of any supplier for small work is the ratio. How much of what you are buying is the change, and how much is the apparatus around it?

Describing the job so it can be priced without a meeting#

This is the part you control, and doing it well is what makes a written price possible.

• Say what you want to happen, not how to build it. "The Monday report should include the branch name" is better than a suggestion about the database.
• Say where. Which screen, which report, which form. A URL or a screenshot removes most of the ambiguity.
• Say who it affects and roughly how often. It tells a developer how careful to be.
• Say what it is worth avoiding. "This currently takes somebody two hours every Monday" converts a vague annoyance into a case.
• Send an example. The actual spreadsheet, the actual document, with real data if you can.

Five minutes of that gets a real price back. It is also, usefully, the same information a developer would extract from you in a forty-five minute call.

When a small job is not really a small job#

In fairness, sometimes the answer is that it is bigger than it looks, and a supplier saying so is being honest rather than difficult.

A change that sounds small but touches money, tax, personal data or anything a regulator cares about carries testing that dwarfs the change itself. A change to a system that cannot be run anywhere except live is slow for reasons that have nothing to do with its size. And a system with no tests means every small change carries a risk of breaking something unrelated, which has to be checked by hand.

What you should expect in those cases is an explanation of why, in plain English, and a price. Not a refusal, and not a meeting.

What we do#

We take small jobs. That is the business, rather than a favour we do around the edges of larger work.

There is no minimum. Prices start at £15 for the smallest changes, and the published bands run up from there, so you can see roughly where a job lands before you speak to anybody. You describe what you need, it gets graded by size, and you get the price in writing before anything begins. Nothing starts until you approve it, and if the number is wrong for you, you walk away owing nothing.

The line on our site is the one we would stand behind: the price changes with the size of the job, the standard never does. Thirty years of experience sits behind a £45 change in the same way it sits behind a £4,500 build, and the reason that is affordable at all is that we do not run an apparatus you would have to pay for.

We are a small operation and that is the advantage rather than something to apologise for. No account managers, no discovery process, no retainer to sign.

If you have been sitting on something small for months because it felt too minor to raise, that is exactly the kind of work we would like to see.