Three builds a year
That is the ceiling, and it is the reason we can promise a named developer rather than whoever is free. When the three are taken, we say so and give you a date.
(01) Henley-on-Thames · Portals, platforms, internal tools
Most portals get built. Few get used.
We build client portals, booking platforms and internal dashboards for UK businesses — then we stay on to keep them running. Four people. No account managers, no offshore relay, no handover to a team you never met.
(02) The position
Software is judged on a wet Tuesday morning, not on launch day.
Every building in a business park has one: the portal nobody logs into, the system that lost an argument with a spreadsheet. We only take work where we can sit with the people who will actually use the thing, watch them work for a day, and build for that.
Currently building
(03) What we build
Six things, priced before we start.
No day rates that quietly double. Every engagement opens with a fixed-fee discovery, and the build price is agreed in writing before a line of code exists.
01Client portal
Logins, documents, statuses, messages. The place your clients check instead of emailing you for an update.
from £14,500project
02Booking & ordering platform
Availability, payment, confirmation, reschedule, refund — the whole loop, on your own domain rather than someone else's marketplace.
from £18,000project
03Internal dashboard
The shared spreadsheet nine people edit at once, rebuilt with permissions, history and an audit trail.
from £11,000project
04Integration work
Xero, Stripe, HubSpot, single sign-on, and the in-house API nobody documented.
from £3,200project
05Discovery sprint
Two weeks, fixed fee. You leave with a specification, a clickable prototype and a real number. Take it to another firm if you like.
from £5,800two weeks
06Support & hosting
UK hosting, monitoring, security patches, and a named developer who answers the email.
from £850per month
Prices are a guide and exclude VAT. Every figure is confirmed in writing at the end of the discovery sprint.
(04) How an engagement runs · hover a card
Stage 01
Scope
Stage 01
Two weeks on site and on calls. Interviews, a clickable prototype, a fixed price. Yours to keep either way.
Stage 02
Build
Stage 02
Fortnightly releases to a staging link you can log into. If something is wrong, you find out in week two, not month five.
Stage 03
Handover
Stage 03
Source code, documentation, infrastructure access and a half-day session with your staff. The work is yours on final payment.
Stage 04
Support
Stage 04
A named developer, replies the same working day, and a monthly note of what changed. Cancel with 30 days' notice.
(05) Who we are
A studio of four in Henley-on-Thames.
Softlarm started in 2019 on a rescue job: a members' portal for a Thames Valley trade body that had already been built twice and abandoned twice. The third attempt worked, and not because of the technology. It worked because we spent the first fortnight sitting with the two administrators who would be typing into it every day.
That fortnight is now the first thing we sell. Everything else we do is downstream of it. The company behind this website is Brock Technologies Ltd, registered in England & Wales and run from RG9.
Nothing is subcontracted
The people in the discovery meeting write the code. It is slower to scale and it is the whole point.
Boring technology
Postgres, a long-lived framework, plain server-rendered pages where they will do. Most portals fail from neglect, not from a lack of novelty, so we choose what another developer can still pick up in 2031.
Work we turn down
Marketing microsites, crypto, anything where the brief is a feature list with no user behind it. We will point you to someone better suited and mean it.
(06) Next step
Bring us the process that still runs on email.
An hour on a call, no charge and no proposal deck. If a discovery sprint is not the right answer we will tell you on that call.
(07) Contact
Softlarm
Email
[email protected]
Telephone
+44 7480 250 843
Registered office
Brock Technologies Ltd28 Gainsborough Crescent
Henley-on-Thames
RG9 1TA
United Kingdom
Hours
Monday to Friday, 9:00–17:30
Tell us what is not working.
One or two paragraphs is plenty. We reply within one working day, and a person reads it.
Softlarm
Thank you — that has reached us. We reply within one working day, usually the same afternoon.