Senior hires take months
London’s engineering market is crowded with banks, big tech and well-funded startups. A senior hire can take months to land, and the best candidates arrive with counter-offers.
Software development company · London
Web apps, mobile apps, SaaS products, AI features and the integrations that tie them together — built for London SMEs, startups, scale-ups and in-house product teams by engineers who keep your hours, show you working software every fortnight and hand over code you own.
The London problem
The ideas are rarely the issue. Capacity, cost and coordination are — and London makes all three harder.
What to expect from a partner
London’s engineering market is crowded with banks, big tech and well-funded startups. A senior hire can take months to land, and the best candidates arrive with counter-offers.
Contractors fill the gap, but at London day rates a small team gets through a budget quickly — and the knowledge leaves when the contract ends.
Quotes, bookings, rotas and month-end reporting live in spreadsheets and inboxes that one or two people truly understand.
The CRM, the accounts package and the operations tool each hold part of the picture, so staff re-key the same data every day.
Plenty of agencies build a good-looking first version. Fewer want to own the backend, the integrations and the releases for years afterwards.
Directors, partners and investors want working software, not status reports — and now and then they want everyone in one room.
Who we work with
Different corners of London, different briefs. What they share is a need for software that ships and keeps working.
A first product built properly, or a managed team shipping the roadmap while you recruit your own engineers — then a clean handover.
Knowledge Quarter teams turning models, datasets and lab processes into dashboards, portals and APIs that non-specialists can use.
Quoting tools, booking systems, customer portals and dashboards for growing businesses that have outgrown their spreadsheets.
Secure document portals, matter and engagement trackers, and AI assistants for professional firms in the City and around Holborn.
Asset libraries, production trackers, rights and licensing records, and client review portals for studios, agencies and publishers.
A mobile app, a set of integrations or a migration your own engineers have no room for, delivered inside your tools and sprints.
What we build
One team across design, engineering and support, so a web app, its mobile companion and the integrations behind them are built to fit together.
Customer portals, booking and quoting tools, dashboards, and fast marketing sites with a CMS your team can run.
iOS and Android apps for customers or staff on the move, usually from one React Native or Flutter codebase.
Document extraction, knowledge search and assistants that take repetitive reading and typing off people’s desks — with a person approving what matters.
A focused first release for founders and corporate teams testing a new idea, built to production standard from the start.
Software shaped around how your business actually runs — approvals, rotas, stock, jobs and reporting — in place of the spreadsheets.
Connect the CRM, the accounts package, payments and your own product, so data moves once and nobody re-keys it.
Working together
We are remote-first. Our engineers sit in the UK and India and keep UK business hours, so your working day is our working day: meetings fall in normal London hours and there is no overnight gap built into every question.
Day to day, you get a shared Slack or Microsoft Teams channel with the people writing the code, a video call whenever something is easier to talk through, a written update every week — what shipped, what is next, what is blocked, what we need from you — and a sprint demo every fortnight on a staging environment your team can use at any time.
The moments that matter most — a discovery kick-off with directors, a workshop with the staff who will use the system, a launch review with your board or investors — run as focused video sessions with a shared board, and the decisions are written up so everyone works from the same notes. Remote delivery keeps costs sensible and progress visible.
Techsleight Labs is a London-based trading name of Krapton IT Consultancy, a UK company registered at 128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX, so your contract, your invoices and your recourse are all with a UK company.
Useful building blocks
Public APIs and open data that make a feature genuinely useful to Londoners. We check licences, usage limits and data quality in discovery before designing around any of them.
Line status, live arrivals, disruptions and journey data from Transport for London — for apps, booking flows and screens that need to know how people are getting around.
Open datasets from the Greater London Authority — population, housing, transport and environment — useful for site selection, borough-level reporting and civic tools.
Company profiles, officers and filing history from the free public API, for pre-filled sign-up forms, supplier checks and B2B onboarding.
Account data and pay-by-bank through authorised Open Banking providers, for lending, accounting and personal finance products.
Xero, QuickBooks and Sage integrations, and Stripe for cards and subscriptions, so month-end stops depending on copy and paste.
Single sign-on for internal tools, so staff use the accounts they already have and leavers lose access in one place.
How we work
The same seven stages on every project, run remotely on UK business hours with your team involved at every step.
A kick-off on video with the people who own the problem, then interviews with the staff or customers who will use the software.
Problem, users and success measures in writing
We agree the first release and what waits, and how we will work together: channels, demo slots, who signs off, and the budget in pounds.
Scope, working agreement and quote
User journeys, wireframes and a clickable prototype, alongside the architecture, data model and integration plan that will carry it.
Prototype and architecture decisions
Work runs in two-week sprints, each closing with a demo, plus a written update every week. Your team can use the staging environment at any time, not just on demo day.
Working software every fortnight
Automated tests written as we build, then manual QA, accessibility and performance checks before anything goes live.
Test evidence and a release checklist
Production release with monitoring, backups and a rollback plan, timed around your trading calendar rather than ours.
A live system and a handover pack
A support retainer for fixes and improvements, or a handover to your own engineers with documentation and walkthroughs.
Support plan or clean handover
Engagement models
Start with a discovery sprint while the scope is still forming. Move to a fixed-price project, named developers or a managed team once you know what you need.
From £2,000 fixed fee
You have an idea or a problem, but not yet a scope you would trust a quote against.
Quoted after discovery
A defined build — an MVP, a rebuild or a feature set — with milestones and a fixed budget.
From £2,900 per developer / month
Ongoing roadmap work where you want named engineers inside your own sprints.
From £9,500 per month
A small cross-functional pod — engineering, QA and delivery lead — that owns an outcome.
Prices are in GBP. Every estimate is confirmed in writing after a discovery call — the figures above are where engagements start, not a quote.
Relevant work
A spreadsheet replacement for a university, client intake for a law firm and a mobile fintech product — three of the build types this page covers.
All case studiesUniversity management system replacing spreadsheet enrolment and timetabling.
Client intake, risk checks and document workflows for a boutique law firm.
Mobile-first money transfer and card app for a cross-border fintech.
Why Techsleight
No inflated numbers — just how we run projects, and what you can hold us to.
We ask what the software is for before we estimate it — and we will tell you when something should not be built, or should be bought instead.
LLM features, retrieval and automation built with evaluation, guardrails and cost controls, and plain software where that is the better answer.
Design, frontend, backend, mobile, cloud and QA in one team, so nothing falls between suppliers.
UK business hours, estimates in pounds, and a contract with a UK company. Our engineers are based in the UK and India.
A fixed-scope project, dedicated developers or a monthly retainer — and you can move between them as the work changes.
Code, IP, cloud accounts and documentation are yours from day one. We sign an NDA before discovery if you need one.
We stay on for fixes, upgrades and new features, or hand over cleanly to your in-house team with the documentation to match.
FAQs
Straight answers on scope, cost, timelines and how we work. If yours is not here, ask us directly.
It depends on scope, integrations and how much already exists. A discovery sprint to define the first release starts from £2,000, and the build that follows is priced as a fixed sum, billed at milestones. Ongoing capacity is priced monthly — named developers from £2,900 each, a managed team from £9,500 — which is worth comparing, like for like, with the same capacity from London contractors.
Our engineers are in the UK and India, and all of them work UK business hours. Delivery is remote: video calls, a shared channel, a written update every week and a demo every fortnight, with workshops such as a discovery kick-off or a launch review run on video.
Krapton IT Consultancy, a London-based UK company — Techsleight Labs is its trading name. Its registered office is at 128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX. Estimates and invoices are in pounds, and an NDA can be in place before discovery starts.
No. The team works UK business hours, so there is no overnight lag built into every question. Emails get a reply within one working day, and during a project the shared Slack or Teams channel with your engineers is there for the quicker back-and-forth.
Yes. We can own a workstream end to end or add named developers to your sprints, working in your repositories, tools and ceremonies. We agree code review standards and who approves releases at the start, so nothing reaches production without your team seeing it.
It is a common starting point. We begin with a short review of the code, hosting and access — who holds the passwords matters as much as the code — then give you a plain-English view of what to keep, fix or replace before any new features are built.
Most projects start within 5–7 working days of sign-off. If a date matters — a funding milestone, a trading peak, a contract start — tell us on the first call and we will plan discovery backwards from it.
You do. Source code, designs, documentation and the cloud and domain accounts are registered to your organisation from day one, so you can bring development in-house or change supplier without asking anyone’s permission.
We can. Public sector bodies have specific accessibility duties, so the work is built and checked against WCAG 2.2 AA and we help draft the accessibility statement. Where a project uses open data — from the London Datastore, for example — we check the licence and update schedule before building on it.
Often, yes — if a mature product fits the way you work, buy it, and we will say so. Building makes sense when the workflow is what sets your business apart, when off-the-shelf tools force expensive workarounds, or when per-user fees for a growing team outstrip the cost of owning the software.
Start a project
Tell us what you want to build or fix, who will use it and any dates that matter. We reply within one working day with questions, a suggested first step and a view on budget.
What happens next
Techsleight Labs is a trading name of Krapton IT Consultancy.
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