The same engineering, without the agency around it.
Before 251 Design, our background was building software for companies doing $50 million a year and up, in regulated industries where the system going down is an incident and not an inconvenience.
What we worked on before this
- Financial transactions
- Systems that moved billions of dollars. Money software is unforgiving: there is no partially correct balance, and every edge case is somebody's account.
- Healthcare
- Software handling patient data, where the rules about who may see what are not a preference and getting them wrong is not a bug report.
- Regulated industries
- Environments with auditors, compliance requirements and a paper trail for every change. It teaches you to build things you can explain later.
- Uptime that mattered
- Applications where downtime was measured and escalated. You learn to care about the failure you have not thought of yet.
None of that is because your app needs an audit trail or five nines. It is because the habits from building things that cannot fall over do not switch off when the project is smaller.
So why is it cheaper than an agency
Not because it is a lesser version of the work. We are small, so nothing is paying for a sales team or a floor of developers, and we use AI tooling hard enough that the same build takes a fraction of the hours it took four years ago. An agency is not overcharging you for the code; it is charging you for the company around it.
Why fixed price
An hourly quote moves the risk of a bad estimate onto you. Estimating is our job. If we get it wrong that is ours to absorb, and the scoping week exists so we get it wrong less often.
What we actually do all day
We run a WooCommerce parts business, an invoicing and CRM system we wrote, and an automation platform that operates both. The apps on the work page are ours, in the App Store, built the way yours would be. These are not capabilities we read about.
What we will tell you no about
Anything where the hard part is scale rather than software — video streaming, real machine learning, anything that lives or dies on infrastructure. You want a bigger shop for that, and saying so costs us a sale and saves you considerably more.
What we build with
- Mobile
- React Native and Expo, one codebase for iOS and Android
- Web
- Laravel, Inertia and Vue
- Data
- MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, and whatever your existing system speaks
- Delivery
- App Store and Google Play submission, with the accounts handed to you
Based in Knoxville, Tennessee. Nearly all of this work happens remotely, and we have never needed to be in the same room as a client to ship a project.
Tell us what you need
Fifteen minutes is usually enough to say whether it is a job we should take, how long it takes and what it costs. If it is not a fit, we will tell you that too.
Book a call