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BasilBase is a product studio for small software businesses. We take an idea that lives in a notes app, scope it into something buildable, design it, write the code, put it in front of Apple and Google, and stay on to keep it running once real people depend on it. No agency theatre, no six-week discovery invoice — a senior team of four to six people, working in two-week cycles you can watch.
The boring, well-documented tools we bet client money on
Products designed and shipped
Since the studio opened in 2019
People using software we wrote
Across web and both app stores
Days to first store submission
Median for our MVP sprint
Clients who come back
Second build or ongoing retainer
What we build
We are a small studio on purpose. That means we say no to a lot of work — no CMS rebuilds, no marketing sites, no ten-person waterfall programmes. What is left is the thing we are genuinely good at: turning a product idea into software that runs in production and charges money.
The whole business in software form: onboarding, accounts, permissions, subscriptions, admin tooling and the dashboards you need to run it. We build the version that can charge money in week six, not the version that demos well.
Native Swift and SwiftUI work with the review process treated as part of the build, not an afterthought. We handle App Store Connect, privacy manifests, screenshots, in-app purchases and the rejection emails so you never have to read guideline 4.2 at midnight.
Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, built for the device spread that actually shows up in your analytics. Data safety forms, staged rollouts, Play Billing and the pre-launch report are all part of the delivery, not an extra line item.
The interface your customers log into every morning. Fast, keyboard-friendly, readable on a laptop in a warehouse, and cheap to host. We use Next.js or Laravel depending on where your team can maintain it afterwards.
Retrieval, summarisation, classification and assistants wired into a product that already works. We start from the cost per request and the failure mode, then decide whether a model is even the right answer — often a rules engine is cheaper and more honest.
Someone has to renew the certificates, watch the error budget, answer the store review team and shrink the cloud bill. A monthly retainer buys a named engineer, a shared board, monitoring you can read, and a quarterly report on where the money goes.
Everything above can be bought as a fixed-scope project, a two-week sprint, or a monthly retainer. Most clients start with one small paid discovery block so nobody signs a big number blind.
Compare engagement modelsWhy teams pick us
Most founders arrive here after one bad experience: an agency that disappeared behind a project manager, or a freelancer who vanished mid-sprint. We built BasilBase to be the thing we wished existed — small, senior, blunt about trade-offs, and contractually easy to leave.
// How a BasilBase engagement is actually shaped.
export const engagement = {
team: ['product lead', 'designer', '2–3 engineers'],
cadence: '2 weeks',
demo: 'every second Friday, live',
reporting: {
shipped: 'what actually works now',
slipped: 'what moved, and why',
spend: 'hours + cloud, to the day',
},
ownership: {
repository: 'yours',
cloudAccount: 'yours',
storeListings: 'yours',
exitNotice: 30, // days, no penalty
},
whatWeRefuse() {
return [
'unscoped fixed-price megaprojects',
'building 40 features before 40 users',
'holding your accounts hostage',
];
},
};How we work
Nothing about this process is proprietary and none of it is a secret sauce. It is simply the sequence that stops projects from dying: decide what to build, prove it cheaply, design the hard screens first, build in short cycles you can watch, then treat the launch as an engineering problem rather than a marketing event.
01
Forty-five minutes, no slides. You describe the outcome you want and who is supposed to pay for it. We ask uncomfortable questions about the users you already have, the budget you actually control, and the date that is non-negotiable. You leave with a straight answer about whether we are the right studio.
02
A paid block of one to two weeks where we turn the idea into something buildable: user flows, a data model, the integrations that will hurt, the features we recommend cutting, and a build plan with a fixed price band. If you walk away afterwards, the document is yours to take to anyone else.
03
Interface design in the real constraints: platform conventions, the smallest phone your analytics show, dark mode, empty states, error states and the accessibility rules that stop a store rejection later. We design the ugly screens first because that is where products die.
04
Code from day one against a real backend, with CI, tests on the paths that hold money, and a build in your hands every second Friday. You get a board you can read, a changelog written in human language, and an engineer you can message directly.
05
Beta through TestFlight and the Play internal track, a QA pass on real devices, privacy manifests and data safety forms filled in properly, store copy and screenshots produced, and the review process handled by us — including the appeal, if it comes to that.
06
Post-launch is where a micro-SaaS is won or lost. We instrument activation and churn, read the numbers with you monthly, ship the small changes that move them, and keep the infrastructure bill proportional to revenue rather than to ambition.
Selected work
These are not concept pieces. Each one has a paying audience, an uptime record and a support inbox. Where we can name the client we do; where we cannot, the numbers are still exactly as reported.
LeafLedger · 2025
A bookkeeping micro-SaaS for freelancers who hate bookkeeping. Web app plus an iOS companion that turns a photo of a receipt into a categorised expense in under four seconds.
PulseKit · 2025
A recovery and habit tracker for people coming back from injury. Built for both stores from a single Flutter codebase, with an offline-first data layer that syncs when the gym Wi-Fi finally works.
StockSprig · 2024
Stock counting, purchase orders and low-stock alerts for independent retailers. An installable PWA plus an Android build for the rugged scanners the warehouse already owned.
ClinicCal · 2024
Scheduling and reminders for small clinics, with a booking page patients can use without an account and a back office that a receptionist learned in one afternoon.
RouteBasil · 2024
Job dispatch, route planning and proof of completion for maintenance crews who spend their day in vans and basements — so everything works with no signal and reconciles later.
QuietHours · 2023
A deliberately tiny iOS utility: schedule focus blocks, silence the right notifications, and see an honest weekly report. Shipped in nineteen days, then left alone on purpose.
The stack
A technology choice is a hiring decision in disguise. Every tool below was picked because it is well documented, widely known, and possible to hire for in a week — not because it trended on a conference stage. When a client insists on something exotic we will build it, but we will put the maintenance cost in writing first.
Native where it matters, cross-platform where it pays. We decide per product, and we tell you why.
Interfaces that stay fast on a mid-range laptop and readable at 125% zoom.
Predictable, well-understood infrastructure with a bill you can forecast.
The systems that turn a product into a business, wired in from the first release.
What clients say
Nobody here needs to be called visionary. “It shipped on the date you said, the invoice matched the estimate, and the thing still works a year later” is the review we optimise for.
We had been quoted nine months and a number with an extra digit. BasilBase scoped it in two weeks, cut a third of what we thought we needed, and had paying users on it in seven. The cutting was the valuable part.
What I did not expect was how boring the process felt, in the best way. Every second Friday there was a build, a short note about what moved and what did not, and no surprises in the invoice.
Our previous team left us a codebase nobody could run. BasilBase spent two paid weeks reading it and then told us honestly that half of it was worth keeping. That answer saved us about forty thousand dollars.
They handled the App Store review including a rejection we would not have understood, and never once made it our problem. The app went live four days after submission.
The retainer is the part I would recommend hardest. Someone watches the errors, the certificates get renewed, and the cloud bill went down two quarters in a row instead of quietly up.
They talked us out of the AI feature we asked for and shipped a much simpler rules engine instead. It cost a fifth as much and it has never produced a wrong answer to a customer.
Engagement models
These are honest starting points, not anchors designed to make the next call awkward. After scoping you get a band with a floor and a ceiling, and the ceiling is the number we hold ourselves to unless you change the scope in writing.
For an idea that needs a shape, a price and an honest verdict before anybody commits a real budget.
$4,900 fixed, 2 weeks
For getting one platform in front of paying users as fast as is responsible.
$14,900 from, 4–6 weeks
For a product with users and revenue that needs to run on every platform without falling over.
$29,900 from, 10–14 weeks
For teams who want a standing engineering capability without hiring four people.
$6,900 per month, rolling
Prices exclude VAT and third-party costs such as cloud hosting, developer programme fees and paid APIs — which we forecast for you before you commit, so there are no quiet surprises in month two.
Honest comparison
If your project is one screen and a form, hire a good freelancer — you will pay less and get it faster. If you need forty people and a compliance programme, hire a large agency. We sit in the middle, and we would rather you know that before the first call than after the second invoice.
| Consideration | Solo freelancer | Large agency | BasilBase |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who writes the code | One person, all of it | A rotating pool you rarely meet | The same four to six seniors, named in the contract |
| What happens when they are ill | Everything stops | Someone new reads the ticket | A second engineer already knows the codebase |
| Design | Usually subcontracted | Strong, sometimes detached from build | In-house, sitting in the same cycle as engineering |
| Store submission | Often your job | Extra line item | Included, appeals and rejections handled |
| Ownership of code and accounts | Usually yours | Sometimes on their platform | Yours from the first commit, always |
| After launch | Depends on their next contract | New statement of work | 30 days of fixes included, optional retainer after |
| How you leave | Whenever | Notice period and exit fees | 30 days, no penalty, handover document included |
Questions
Money, ownership, timing and what happens if it goes wrong. We would rather answer all of it in public than make you extract it politely over email.
A validation sprint is $4,900. Most single-platform MVPs land between $14,900 and $28,000. Multi-platform products with billing, teams and an admin panel usually sit between $30,000 and $70,000. Retainers start at $2,400 a month for maintenance and $6,900 for a reserved product team. We give you a band after scoping, not a number over the phone — anyone quoting before they have seen your data model is guessing.
Fixed-scope projects are billed in three parts: 40% to start, 40% at the midpoint demo, 20% on store submission or launch. Retainers are billed monthly in advance with thirty days’ notice to stop. We invoice in USD or EUR, and we do not ask for the full amount up front — that is a risk you should never accept from any studio.
Occasionally, and only as a partial swap on top of a cash floor that covers our costs. If you want to explore it, tell us in the inquiry. We will be honest about whether we believe in the product enough — a polite no is more useful to you than a reluctant yes.
Scoping usually starts within one to two weeks of the first call. Full build slots open at the start of each month and we keep at most two running at a time, which is why the availability note in the header is real and not a scarcity trick.
One decision-maker who can answer questions within a day, roughly two hours a week for a demo and a planning call, and access to anything we cannot create ourselves — brand assets, existing accounts, domain records, third-party API keys. Projects that slip almost always slip on decisions, not on code.
Yes, and it is a large part of what we do. We start with a paid two-week audit: we read the code, run it, map the risky parts, and give you a written verdict on whether to continue it, refactor it or replace it. Sometimes the honest recommendation is “keep the data, rewrite the app”, and we will say so plainly.
Let’s scope it properly
Send us the shape of your idea and we will come back with a written scope, a realistic timeline, a fixed price band and the risks we would want to kill first. No decks, no discovery invoice, no pressure.