About Us

Business Model

Our business is programming services, not selling a "packaged" software product or licenses.

We release many software applications and libraries as open source software. Recently, we released our Image Tools screen capture application as an open source project on Sourceforge.net.

If your company is using one of our software projects. Please consider funding a new feature or improvement you would find useful. You can also make a donation to help maintain existing projects and create new projects.

There is a definitive cost benefit to using us to add features to software we are already familiar with. In cases where many companies are using the same software. Everyone benefits from new features funded by one, and they in turn benefit by features added by others. This way the cost is shared as are the benefits.

Philosophy

Software applications should provide measurable improvements in speed and/or accuracy of the particular task they are created for.

If the effort required to automate the task is more than the benefit, it obviously is not worth it. The more people that do a particular task multiplies the benefits of the savings in time or accuracy gained. Storing as much data as possible in relational database tables give you the advantage of gathering information and history that you may not know you need now, but when you do, it's just a new report away.

Many of our projects started out to fill an immediate need we had. As we developed the software further we wanted to share it with others.

We build software using an open source philosophy of release early and often. Our first goal is to quickly rough out software so that it does the most needed task in the first iteration, sometimes this may only be a command line application at first. This allows the stakeholders in a project the ability to adjust requirements as the software develops. It also allows us to find out where problems may occur so we can add error handling, user messages, and logging as we go through following iterations. When developing software for a client, they can determine the amount of development they require. This allows a client use of the application very early, as well as being highly involved in the development process.

We work as a team with the client toward a common goal, an application that is useful for it's purpose and used by those who need it.

Open Source Software

In order to provide maximum value to our clients, We use and provide services around Open Source / Free Software whenever possible.

We release all non-client funded projects as Open Source / Free Software. This is in the hope that they will be useful to others.

Open Source software allows users to use, change, improve, and redistribute it modified or not. This has a great advantage over proprietary software that you cannot change and must pay for it's use.

We encourage our clients to also use an Open Source / Free Software license for software we develop for them. The benefits of using freely available software libraries usually far outweigh the benefits of purchasing licenses to the many libraries needed for even trivial applications or the substantial hours recreating the functionality to make proprietary applications.

Hourly Rate

The hourly rate for software development including design, programming, and documentation is 50 US dollars per hour.