IT consultancy and support

What we help with

• Deciding what to build or buy. Most problems have an off-the-shelf answer that costs a fraction of custom software. We will tell you when that is the case.
• Vendor selection. Comparing options on what they actually do rather than what the sales deck says, and reading the contract for the parts that bite later.
• Infrastructure. Hosting, domains, email, backups and the boring configuration that nobody owns until it fails.
• Security basics. Multi-factor authentication, access reviews, patching and backups you have actually restored.
• Inheriting somebody else's work. Taking on a system built by a developer who has disappeared, working out what it does, and making it maintainable.
• Responsive support. When something breaks you contact a person directly, not a form.

How it works

Most clients start with a specific question, get an answer, and then keep us on call for the next one. There is no minimum retainer and no contract designed to be hard to leave. If you need us for two hours a month, that is a sensible amount to need us for.

For ongoing work we agree what is covered and what response time to expect, in writing, so there is no argument when something urgent happens.

The advice part

The most valuable thing we do is occasionally tell you not to spend money. A new system when the current one is fine, a subscription for something you already have, a rebuild when a fix would do. We are paid for the work we do, not the work we can talk you into, and we would rather keep a client for five years than win one large project.

What we are not

We are not a desktop support company. If you need somebody to fix printers, reset Windows passwords and manage laptops across an office, a local managed service provider will do that better and cheaper than we will. We work on the software, infrastructure and decisions behind the business, and we will point you at the right kind of firm if that is what you need.