Custom Software · FORGE
Production custom software — SaaS platforms, enterprise applications, legacy modernization, integrations, and mobile. Built by senior engineers who have shipped this exact pattern before, not by a junior squad with a deck.
The problem
The shape of the failure is consistent: a discovery phase that reads more like an estimation gauntlet than a design exercise; a build phase staffed with a rotating cast of mid-level engineers; deferred decisions on auth, observability, and migration; integration work scoped as 'phase 2' that turns out to be load-bearing; and a launch that exposes the architecture to the load it wasn't designed for. Custom software fails at the seams between systems and at the gaps between contracted scope and operating reality.
Prosigns ships custom software the way the practice was supposed to work. Senior engineers from the first day, no junior bench rotations. Architecture decisions made up front in writing, with department co-pilots for the cross-cutting concerns (security, data, platform) the build team would otherwise underweight. Integration is treated as primary scope, not a footnote. The bench you see in the proposal is the bench in production, and the engineer who wrote the SOW is the engineer who staffs the engagement.
What we deliver
SaaS, enterprise applications, legacy modernization, integrations, and mobile.
Multi-tenant architecture, billing, onboarding, scale.
Internal tools, workflow apps, system integrations.
Strangler-fig migrations, replatform vs rearchitect, phased rollouts.
APIs, middleware, iPaaS, event-driven architecture.
Native iOS / Android, React Native, Flutter.
How we engage
The methodology shows up in the statement of work — not as slogans, but as deliverables, owners, and acceptance criteria.
Two-week design phase: data model, integration surface, auth boundaries, observability, deployment topology, scaling thesis. Output is an Architecture Decision Record — not slides. The ADR becomes the contract for the build phase and the artifact your platform team can challenge.
Senior engineers (G6+) plus department co-pilots from FORGE (lead), CITADEL (compliance), NEXUS (cloud), and CORTEX (where AI is in scope). Two-week sprints with named acceptance criteria per increment. No junior bench rotations, no opaque hand-offs.
Deployment topology designed before the first commit. Infrastructure as code, environment promotion, observability and runbooks shipping alongside the application. Gradual cutover with documented rollback paths — not a flag flip and a prayer.
Choose: stay with us under Managed Services for ongoing operations and feature delivery, or hand off with a 90-day shadowing period and complete operational documentation. Either way, the runbook, ADR set, and eval suite are yours from day one.
Capabilities
Stack
Selected work
12x
tenant onboarding speedReplaced a single-tenant Rails monolith with a multi-tenant Next.js + Postgres architecture. Migrated 240 customers across nine months under a documented rollback path, with zero data loss and < 30 minutes total downtime.
9 months
+38%
appointment complianceSMART-on-FHIR launches into Epic, role-aware dashboards, multilingual messaging, and consent-aware intake. Phased strangler-fig rollout off a legacy portal under a 9-month engagement.
8 months
−18%
miles per deliveryBuilt a real-time dispatch UI on top of a streaming routing pipeline. Migrated batch jobs to event-driven workers, with progressive UI adoption that survived seasonal peak load on launch week.
11 months
Common questions
Production systems across five categories: multi-tenant SaaS platforms, enterprise applications and internal tools, legacy modernization and replatforming, API and integration work, and mobile applications. We don't take on prototype-only or design-only engagements — every project is scoped to ship into production with monitoring, governance, and an operations plan.
Both, depending on the engagement model. Project-Based delivery is fixed-price with milestones and explicit acceptance criteria — best for bounded initiatives. Dedicated Teams is time and materials with quarterly cadence — best for multi-quarter capability gaps. Managed Services is a monthly retainer with named SLAs — best for ongoing operations of what we built or what you built. We publish all three honestly with budget brackets.
Mostly with — pure replacement is rare. Most engagements embed senior engineers alongside your team, sharing repos, ceremonies, and ownership. Where we do greenfield work end-to-end, we hand off with a 90-day shadowing period and full documentation so your team owns operations after we leave. The only times we replace are when the customer has explicitly decided to dissolve the existing team or when there is no existing team yet.
Yes — that's CITADEL's job. SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 alignment, HIPAA, GDPR / CCPA / PIPEDA, PCI-DSS, FedRAMP, and NERC CIP are all in our active engagement portfolio. Compliance evidence is collected continuously during delivery rather than scrambled at audit time. We engineer to your specific posture in the discovery phase — not to a generic 'we're compliant' checkbox.
Strangler-fig migration is the default. We assess what to replatform, what to rearchitect, and what to retire — then build the migration tooling (dual-writes, traffic shadowing, replay) that lets us cut over incrementally. Most engagements migrate workloads in 5–15% increments with documented rollback at every stage. Big-bang cutovers are reserved for the rare cases where the substrate is so broken that nothing can be salvaged — and we will tell you when that's the case.
That's what discovery is for. A 4–6 week discovery engagement (fixed-price, $50K–$150K) produces an Architecture Decision Record, a phased delivery plan, a defensible budget, and a recommended engagement model. Many discovery engagements end with us recommending you don't proceed with us — or don't proceed at all. We'd rather lose the build than ship something that wasn't ready to be built.
Yes — CANVAS (our design and UX department) embeds into the build squad rather than operating as a separate phase. Product design, interaction design, design systems, and accessibility-first interfaces ship inside the engineering cadence. We don't run a separate design phase that hands off to engineering after a Figma review.
Discovery + ADR: 4–6 weeks, $50K–$150K. Production build for a focused initiative: 3–6 months, $250K–$1M. Multi-quarter platform builds with embedded squads: $1M–$5M+. Managed services for ongoing operations: $40K–$150K monthly retainer. Brackets published honestly so visitors self-qualify before the first call.
Related practices
Talk to us
A senior engineer plus the FORGE department lead joins the first call. No discovery gauntlet, no junior reps, no obligation.