You talk to the people building it
Software suppliers are easy to hire and hard to hold to account. Here is how we work, what we will tell you for free, and where we are not the right fit.
We build what we design
The usual arrangement puts a designer, a developer and an account manager between you and the thing being built. Every boundary is somewhere a decision gets reinterpreted, and most of what goes wrong in a software project goes wrong at one of those boundaries rather than in the code.
We don’t work that way. The people who scope your system design it, and the people who design it build it. When you ask why something works the way it does, you are asking someone who made the decision, not someone relaying it.
Proof, not a portfolio of mockups
Plenty of suppliers can show you screens. Fewer can show you something running in production with real accounts, real payments and real data in it.
Notara began as an AI-assisted NDIS documentation platform: support workers describe a shift in plain English and it generates draft case notes, incident reports and progress notes for a human to review. We designed, built and deployed the whole thing — authentication, Stripe subscriptions, Claude API integration, sensitive-data handling, and a database structured around a regulated-adjacent domain.
It is still live. That is the difference between saying we can ship and having shipped.
Straight answers, including the ones that cost us work
The fastest way to waste money on software is to build something you could have bought. We will say so when that is the case, name the product, and not send you an invoice for the conversation.
- If off-the-shelf software already does the job, we will tell you which one.
- If the problem is a process rather than a system, building software will only make it faster to do the wrong thing — and we will say that.
- If a project is too large for the budget, we will tell you before you spend it, not two-thirds of the way through.
- If the honest answer is to do nothing this year, that is a legitimate answer and you will get it.
Scope and price agreed before work starts
You get what it does, what it does not do, and what it costs, in writing, before anything is built. No hourly meter running in the background and no invoice that arrives larger than the conversation implied.
Work then arrives in increments you can open and use, rather than a long silence ending in a reveal. If the approach turns out to be wrong, that surfaces in week two when it is cheap to change, not in month four when it is not.
Built to be handed over
Some suppliers make themselves difficult to leave. We would rather be easy to leave and worth staying with.
- The code is yours, and the repository is in your organisation’s name.
- Hosting, database and third-party accounts are registered to your business, not to ours.
- Written documentation of how it runs, deploys and recovers.
- A handover another developer can pick up without needing to call us.
Where we are not the right fit
Being useful to you sometimes means saying no, so it is worth being clear about it up front.
- You need round-the-clock incident response with a guaranteed answer at 3am. We are not a managed service, and you should buy one.
- You need a large amount of software delivered very quickly across several workstreams at once. Depth suits us better than breadth.
- You want a supplier who will agree to a fixed price for a brief nobody has scoped yet. That quote is always wrong, and the argument comes later.
- You are looking for the cheapest quote available. We are unlikely to be it, and the cheapest quote is rarely the cheapest project.
Common questions
What makes Notara different from a software agency?
The people who scope your system design it, and the people who design it build it. Most of what goes wrong in a software project goes wrong at the boundaries between those roles rather than in the code, so removing the boundaries removes a category of problem.
What happens if we want to leave?
You can. The repository is in your organisation's name, hosting and third-party accounts are registered to your business, and the handover includes written documentation another developer can pick up. We would rather be easy to leave and worth staying with.
Worth a conversation?
A 30-minute intro call, no charge and no pitch deck. You’ll get a straight answer on whether the thing is worth building — including if the answer is no.
Book a call