# Your business has changed. Your software hasn’t.

Nerdy Ventures is a fractional software engineering department: the capability of an in-house team, without the headcount. We bring the systems you have up to date, connect the ones that don’t talk to each other, replace the ones past saving, and build what nobody sells off the shelf. Fixed prices. Direct access. Software you own. 

[Book a 30-minute call](/contact/) [See what it costs](/services/)

The first conversation is free. If we’re not the right fit, we’ll say so on the call.

## If any of these sound familiar, this is for you.

*   The system you bought is three versions behind, and the vendor stopped supporting yours years ago.
*   Someone re-keys the same numbers into two different systems every morning.
*   The application your operation runs on was built by a contractor who stopped answering email in 2019.
*   The report you actually need takes a person most of a day to put together by hand.
*   You bought software that was supposed to fix this. It mostly moved the problem.
*   Nobody is certain who would fix the server if it stopped, or whether the backups work.

Each of these is a software problem with nobody assigned to it. Assigning somebody is the entire job. 

## Three ways to work together. One price before we start.

### Find out what you've got Assessment, one to two weeks

We talk to the people doing the work, map every system you run and how they connect, and put a number on the manual effort. You get a written report, a costed and prioritised plan, and a plain answer on where AI would pay in your business and where it wouldn't. Yours to keep, whether or not you hire us for the next step.

$3,500–$7,500 Credited in full against a project booked within 60 days

### Build what you need Fixed-price project, typically 4 to 12 weeks

Internal tools, connecting two systems that don't talk, reporting that currently takes a day by hand, or replacing the application nobody maintains any more. Fixed scope, fixed price, billed at milestones. Delivered running, documented, with your people trained on it.

$5,000–$75,000 Small, well-defined jobs skip the assessment and get a quote from one call

### Keep it running Monthly agreement

Somebody is finally responsible for the software. We look after the application and the infrastructure it runs on: updates, backups, monitoring, fixes, and changes as they come up. Same number every month, answered by the next business day.

From $1,500/mo Three-month minimum, then month to month on 30 days notice

### Something that doesn't fit these Bespoke engagement

A longer build, a system that has to stay live while it is replaced, a mix of the three above, or a situation none of them describes. The structure here is a starting point, not a rule. Tell us what you actually need and we will shape an engagement around it, with the price agreed before work starts, same as everything else.

[Tell us what you need](/contact/)

Most companies start with the assessment. It is the only honest way to price the rest, and it comes off the bill if you go ahead.

[What each one includes](/services/) 

## What you can hold us to.

### A price before the work starts.

Fixed scope, fixed fee, billed at milestones. If we misjudged the effort, that is our problem, not your invoice.

### You own what we build.

The code, the documentation, the accounts, the servers. Walk away whenever you like and it keeps running.

### Answers by the next business day.

Every agreement, every tier. We don’t sell an overnight emergency line, because we would rather promise only what we can keep.

### Senior work only.

Nobody learns on your project. Whoever scopes it leads the build, and is who answers when you call.

### Your hours, your language, your contracts.

We work the same day you do, and the agreement is one your lawyer can read.

### We will say no.

To work we shouldn’t take, to features that won’t earn their upkeep, and to a rewrite when a repair will do.

[Start with a conversation](/contact/) [How we work](/about/) 

## The software you already have is usually worth saving.

Our specialty is the part nobody advertises: **databases, migrations, upgrades, and the legacy systems your business already runs on.** The vendor system three versions behind that nobody dares upgrade. The application whose developer stopped answering. The spreadsheet that quietly became the inventory system. The server nobody wants to reboot. 

Most of this work is not building something new. It is understanding something that already exists, usually without documentation and usually without the person who wrote it, and making it safe to change again. 

Plenty of firms would rather sell you a rewrite. It is a bigger invoice for them and a year of risk for you, and it is often the most expensive way to end up roughly where you started. 

We start by asking whether the thing you have can be made to work. Usually it can. When it genuinely can’t, we’ll show you why, and the plan for replacing it will be sized to your business rather than to our invoice. 

## AI, without the pitch.

Every vendor you talk to now has an AI story, and most of them are selling you something. Nerdy Ventures has built with these tools in production, which is how we know what they are genuinely good at, what they are not, and what they cost to run once the demo is over. 

We will tell you, in plain language, which of the promises apply to your business and which don’t. No jargon, no roadmap deck, no pilot that never ends. 

Sometimes the answer is a real, unglamorous win: pulling data out of documents somebody re-types by hand, sorting and routing inbound requests, finding patterns in numbers too big to eyeball. Often it is a spreadsheet fix that costs a tenth as much and works the first time. 

Either way, you get the answer and the working software, not the sales pitch. If AI doesn’t pay in your business, we’ll say so, and you’ll have saved the money someone else would have happily taken. 

[Get a straight answer on AI](/contact/)

Bring the AI pitch you were sent last week. We’ll tell you what it would actually do.

## What the cheap quote actually costs.

You can find a development shop that bills thirty-five dollars an hour. Plenty of businesses have tried one, and it usually goes the same way. 

You can’t tell whether the work is any good, because you don’t have anyone who could judge it. You can’t write a specification precise enough to build from, because writing that specification is most of the job. And when something breaks at nine in the morning, the people who built it are asleep. 

Then the software is handed back to you, and the running of it becomes your problem, which is the part you are least equipped for and the part that decides whether it still works next year. 

We work your hours, in your language, under contracts your lawyer can read. You deal directly with the people doing the work, not an account manager relaying messages, and nothing is handed to whoever happened to be free. 

We spend time watching how the job actually gets done, on site where that makes sense. That is usually where the real problem turns out to be, and it is rarely the thing you called about. 

And we don’t stop at the code. The servers, the deployments, the backups and the monitoring are part of the work, because software that nobody runs is software that is about to break. 

## Is this for you?

### A good fit

*   Roughly 20 to 200 people, and the business genuinely depends on software to operate.
*   No software engineering staff of your own. Maybe an IT person, maybe nobody technical at all.
*   A process someone describes as “we just do it by hand.”
*   Two systems that a human re-keys data between.
*   An application whose original developer is long gone.
*   You have paid for the cheap version once already and would rather not again.

### Probably not

*   You need a help desk, desktop support or network administration. That is a different trade, and we’ll happily refer you to people who do it well.
*   You need someone answering the phone at two in the morning. That is a managed service provider, and we’ll say so.
*   You’re a funded startup building a product from scratch.
*   Fewer than ten people. Off-the-shelf software is almost certainly the better answer, and we’ll tell you which.

## What happens after you get in touch.

1.  ### You write to us.

    A paragraph about what isn’t working is enough. You don’t need to know what you want built.

2.  ### We talk for thirty minutes.

    No deck. We ask what the problem costs you, who it touches, and what you’ve already tried. If we’re not the right fit, we say so on the call and point you somewhere better.

3.  ### You get a price.

    Small, well-defined work gets a fixed quote from the call. Anything bigger starts with a short paid assessment that ends in a written plan and a fixed price, credited back if you go ahead.

4.  ### We build it, then we keep it running.

    Working software, deployed, documented, your people trained on it. Then a monthly agreement so that, for the first time, somebody is responsible for it.

[Tell us what isn’t working](/contact/)

Bring the process that annoys you most. That is enough for a first conversation.