Custom software vs off-the-shelf job management software: which should an Australian trades business buy?
Off-the-shelf job software vs a custom build for Australian trades: honest three-year costs, the trade-offs, and a one-afternoon way to decide.
Notes
Field notes on building software and AI agents for real businesses.
Guides
Do I need an AI agent or just automation? A plain-English guide for Perth small businesses
Automation follows rules. An AI agent uses judgement. A plain-English guide for Perth small businesses on which one you need and what each costs.
Deploy the AI in your client's cloud, not yours.
The default for most AI tools is: send your data to their servers and trust their promises. For a business handing over its operations, that is a hard sell, and it should be.
So ALEA builds the production app to run inside your own cloud. The agent works on your data where it already lives, and nothing gets shipped off to be trained on. Your data never leaves your systems. That's the starting point, not an add-on.
A prototype is cheap. The production system is the product.
The studio builds a working prototype in minutes, free. That's not generosity, it's the fastest way to agree what we're actually building before anyone spends real money.
The prototype settles the argument: here are the screens, here is the workflow, here is the agent answering a real question. Once that is right, the production system gets built by hand and deployed in your own environment, and you pay from the day it goes live. The demo is the conversation; the build is the deliverable.
What a turbine inspection taught me about software for the field.
An inspection logged on a wind turbine has no room for cleverness. It has to work with gloves on, on a bad connection, at the end of a long climb, for people who never asked for an app.
That constraint is a gift. It strips a tool down to what matters: the fewest taps, the clearest state, nothing that breaks when the network does. Software that survives the field respects the person using it, which turns out to be true everywhere, not just up a tower.