We build the software that other software depends on.
Platforms, APIs and applications for companies whose customers notice the exact second something stops working. We write it, we ship it, and we stay on the phone afterwards.
The unglamorous half of software is the half that matters
Most software does not fail with a bang. A queue backs up at two in the morning. A migration half-runs. A supplier renames a field in their API and tells nobody. There is no crash to point at — only a checkout that takes eleven seconds and a customer who never comes back.
PrimeStack exists to work on that half of the problem. We are a small engineering team based in Guildford, ten minutes from the Research Park, and most of what we build never appears in a screenshot: the APIs, the data pipelines, the deployment plumbing, the retry logic that quietly saves an order at 3am.
In practice that means TypeScript and Go, Postgres rather than whatever is fashionable this year, and infrastructure written to be read by a human being. We produce the runbook before the launch, not after the first incident. When a project ends you get the keys, the diagrams and the reasoning behind every decision — so the next engineer, ours or yours, can pick it up without ringing us first.
We work with founders taking a first product to market, and with finance, logistics and healthcare teams in Surrey and London who have inherited a system nobody dares touch. Both jobs come down to the same thing: making a machine that other people can trust and maintain.
Registered office: 5 Sandalwood, Guildford, GU2 7NZ.
“A platform is finished when the person on call at 3am doesn’t need to phone us.”
That is the standard we write towards. Not a feature list — a system somebody else can hold.
What we take on
Priced from the first conversation, not the fifth.
Every engagement starts with a scoping call and a written estimate. We would rather turn work down early than discover halfway through that the budget was never in the room.
Fixed fee for defined scope; day rate for open-ended work.
Quotes hold for 30 days.
Two weeks. We map the system, the risks and the sequence, then hand you a costed plan you can take to us, to your board, or to anybody else.
Customer-facing applications end to end: authentication, billing, dashboards, and the admin interface nobody remembers to budget for.
First commit to first paying customer. Multi-tenant from day one — retrofitting tenancy later costs three times what building it now does.
One codebase where that is honest, native where it isn’t. Taken through both store reviews and released, not abandoned in TestFlight.
Joining the CRM to the warehouse to the accounts package — with retries, idempotency and an audit trail your finance team can read.
Deployment pipelines, observability and cost control. On most projects the monthly cloud bill goes down before the first new feature ships.
Patching, dependency upgrades, incident response and a named engineer who already knows your system. Rolling monthly, cancel with 30 days’ notice.
Four stages, and you can stop after any of them
A call, then two weeks reading the system and talking to the people who use it. Output: a written plan, a cost and a sequence.
Two-week cycles against a shared board. You see working software at the end of each one — not a status update about working software.
Staged release behind flags, monitoring switched on before the first user arrives, and a rollback we have already rehearsed.
Runbook, architecture diagram and a walkthrough with your team. Keep us on retainer or take the keys and go — both are a fine ending.
We document as we go, because memory is not a handover
Diagrams are written the week the decision is made, while the reasoning is still intact. Six months on, that page is the difference between a twenty-minute fix and a fortnight of archaeology. It is the least exciting thing we do and the one clients thank us for most.
Get a quote
Tell us what is broken, or what you want to exist.
A first call takes half an hour and costs nothing. Bring the problem in whatever state it is in — a spreadsheet, a screenshot, a legacy system nobody documented. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it.
- [email protected]
- Telephone
- 07473 975 532
- Registered office
- Dropbam Ltd
5 Sandalwood
Guildford GU2 7NZ
United Kingdom - Hours
- Monday–Friday, 09:00–18:00
Retainer clients: 24/7 incident line
Thank you — that has reached us.
We read every enquiry ourselves and reply within one working day. If it is urgent, ring 07473 975 532 and you will get an engineer rather than a switchboard.