Scope the Build With Technical Consulting First
Senior engineering judgment on demand: fixed-fee technical audits, one-hour strategy sessions, fractional CTO engagements, and custom application development & support.
Custom applications
Custom Application Development & Support
Membership systems, booking engines, reporting platforms, integrations no plugin can do, built by senior engineers who then stay. Our longest engagement of this kind is in its 13th year.
What Is Custom Application Development?
Breezy Sites builds bespoke business applications and, unusually, takes long-term ownership of existing ones, including legacy PHP and CodeIgniter platforms whose original developers are gone. Work is quoted by scope, integrations, and support tenure; support retainers follow every build.
When does a custom application beat a CMS?
When the workflow is the product: memberships with device data, scheduling with business rules, reporting across systems. Forcing that into a CMS plugin stack costs more in workarounds than a clean build costs in engineering. When a CMS genuinely fits, we'll say so; that's the audit's job. See the signals in more detail on the custom application platform overview.
Legacy rescue: your developer left, the app still runs the business
We take ownership rather than insisting on a rewrite: inventory the code and infrastructure, document what exists, stabilize what's fragile, then maintain it under retainer on the Website Management page. Rewrites happen when evidence says so. The proof this works: a multi-year engagement spanning dozens of production applications, and client relationships past the six-year mark.
What drives a custom-app quote?
Scope (screens, roles, workflows), integrations (each external system is real work), and support tenure (who owns it after launch). We publish no starting price because honest custom scopes vary by an order of magnitude; the quote is written, fixed, and itemized against these three drivers.
What Pairs With a Custom Application Build?
Name the Drivers in an Hour Before You Commit
An hour to name the drivers and leave with a path to a fixed quote.
Long-Term Support Follows Every Custom Build
Predictable monthly retainers that keep your website updated, secure, backed up, and monitored, on any platform, including custom PHP/CodeIgniter applications.
The Infrastructure Layer Underneath a Custom Application
The infrastructure layer underneath a custom application, patched and monitored.
Going deeper
Custom application questions
Do you work with CodeIgniter specifically?
Yes, deeply: production CodeIgniter platforms including HMVC architectures, device APIs, and AWS deployments, maintained continuously for over a decade. Laravel, plain PHP, and modern TypeScript stacks too.
Will you take over an app without documentation?
Yes; that's the normal case. The first engagement phase is producing the documentation that should have existed, and it's valuable even if you take it elsewhere afterward.
Do you always recommend rewriting legacy apps?
No, usually the opposite. A running application encodes years of business rules; rewrites lose them. We stabilize first and rewrite only when the evidence (cost of change, security, platform end-of-life) says so.
What does support look like after a build?
A management retainer covering updates, security, monitoring, and same-week fixes, like our website retainers but scoped to the application. Long tenure is the design goal, not an accident.
How do I get a price?
A Strategy Hour scopes it: you leave with the drivers named and a written path to a fixed quote. For an existing app, the $795 audit of the codebase and infrastructure is usually the honest first step.
Custom applications
Get Your Custom Web Application Built Right.
For an existing app with no documentation, the $795 audit of the codebase and infrastructure is usually the honest first step.