What We Build

Problem

Their student records sat in a locked-in platform the vendor wouldn't fix. Payments went missing (Finance kept a second copy in a spreadsheet), staff shared logins, every applicant touched seven manual steps, and there were no backups. A system they paid for had become a liability.

Approach

We took over running and securing the live learning platform, then built a new student system from scratch — application, student, and admin portals behind one login — so the group owns its own data and its own process, end to end.

Technology

Python and FastAPI on PostgreSQL, Next.js on the front end, Authentik for single sign-on, Docker for deploys. The kind of boring, well-documented tools you can still maintain in ten years.

Outcome

Ten campuses and 51 qualifications now run on the new system. A single payment action kicks off six automations at once. We also caught a subtle copy bug that had been quietly corrupting assessments in a third of their courses, and fixed it without losing a single grade.

Problem

They ran a guard- and security-management platform built from two inherited systems nobody had documented — a 137,000-line web app and an Android app where one file made up nearly half the code. It looked unprofessional, the hosting was unreliable, and the owner told us plainly that the look and feel was the main thing holding back growth.

Approach

We rebuilt it as one platform: a web Control Room for supervisors and clients, and a native Android app for guards in the field, on a hardened backend. We documented the old system before changing a thing, and migrated every table without losing data.

Technology

React and TypeScript for the web, Kotlin for Android, the existing PHP backend hardened rather than rewritten, MySQL, Docker, and push-to-deploy CI/CD.

Outcome

In the first month we shipped what had been planned for ten weeks — the infrastructure, the whole web Control Room, and the admin API. Web and native Android delivered together, which their main competitor can't match (theirs is a web app only).

Problem

Every South African salary calculator works one way: put in your gross salary, see what lands in your bank. But the question people actually ask is the opposite — "I want to take home R40,000; what gross do I need to negotiate?" Nobody answered it.

Approach

We built reverseTax: type the take-home pay you want, get the gross salary that delivers it, with the full PAYE, UIF and benefits breakdown. The calculation engine was checked against real payslips until it was right.

Technology

React and TypeScript, running entirely in your browser (no data leaves your device), Docker and nginx for hosting, GA4 and Sentry so we can see it working.

Outcome

Live and growing on organic search. The net figure matches a real payslip to within a cent, and after an optimisation pass the bundle dropped by two-thirds with Core Web Vitals firmly in the green.

Try reverseTax at sa-reverse-tax-calculator.com