Siftware has been doing custom PHP development every day since the company’s inception in 2006; it’s what we’ve always done.

We have built countless apps from scratch using the most popular PHP frameworks like the Zend Framework (now Laminas), Symfony (since v 0.8!), CakePHP and our favourite, Laravel.

These days, we specialise in taking over the management and support of existing PHP apps. We upgrade supporting infrastructure and add new features to extend their useful life and keep things running.

By becoming responsible for maintaining and keeping the application secure, we remove worry and provide peace of mind to our customers who have had concerns about security and stability.

Can you help me?

The majority of our prospective consulting customers have similar concerns, which loosely fall under one of these headings.

Old & out of date code and security or performance concerns

Does your website keep going down or has your developer told you that the entire app needs re-writing from scratch as it is too old now? Another common concern is your hosting company informing you that PHP on your server needs upgrading but you don’t have anyone internally who can do this.

We can migrate, upgrade and secure your PHP app without a re-write or any fuss.

Hard to get hold of developers

Is it really hard to get hold of anyone to speak to at your agency? Are they always so busy they regularly don’t return your calls or emails? Does it seem like they focussing on new development projects and are leaving you feeling like a second-class citizen because you just need a new feature adding or bug fixing?

Each project has two developers assigned to it that you have direct access to. You get a custom email address for support and you can use our tools to give you an overview of what has been worked on and what needs doing. Once a month (or less for larger projects), we meet and make sure everything is on track and correctly prioritised.

Loss of staff or lack of internal team skills

Are you struggling to deliver the same value year on year, but with a reduced budget?

Maybe one of your developers has left, and there is nobody within the business to do their job?

We regularly work as an extension of our customers’ internal teams and can provide either broad or focused assistance across the board, from development to project management.

How does it work, and how much will it cost?

As you can also see in our high-level process overview, we have a simple 3 stage process when we work with any new customer.

Our core offering is selling blocks of developer time in chunks of 10 days per month or more. Our daily rate reduces as your commitment to us increases.

Average monthly fee. £6000 ex VAT.

Discovery & Specification

We get to understand your needs and get a feel for the app’s infrastructure and footprint. It is likely we will do a high-level code review as well as provide you with some written recommendations that you can take back to your developers.

From £0.

Onboarding

We get everything ready to work on your code. This could include auditing your application, making the application portable or upgrading PHP.

From £3000.

Ongoing development and support

Support & maintenance is customised to your needs and could range from us following our standard monthly server housekeeping & backup checklist all the way through to us managing a busy support desk on your behalf.

From £495 per month.

We are are unable to provide support as a stand-alone service, sorry. We have tried, but our experience tells us that to be effective, our developers need intimate and up-to-date knowledge of the application. This can only be gained by working on it regularly.