Why we build custom software for businesses that were never supposed to afford it

If you asked a family business in India five years ago whether they'd commission custom software, most would have laughed you out of the room. Not because they didn't see the value. They did. But because the math was broken.

Custom software was either an enterprise-vendor sentence or a dev-shop gamble, where the quote came in at ₹40 lakh and the thing that got delivered was a Bootstrap template with a login page. You either couldn't afford it, or you could and regretted it. So you did what every rational operator did: you bought SaaS, bent your business around it, and lived with the friction.

That math changed in the last eighteen months. And nobody's really said it out loud yet.

What actually happened

AI didn't automate the software industry away. It collapsed the cost curve of building custom software. Specifically:

• The engineering hours needed to build a web app, an agent, or an automation dropped by a factor of 5–10 for the kinds of problems most businesses actually have.
• The cost of keeping that software maintainable and documented (historically the part that ate margin) dropped further, because the same tools write the docs, the tests, and the runbooks.
• The barrier to "good enough at small scale" went to near-zero. You don't need a team of eight to build a CRM replacement anymore. You need two senior people who've been doing this long enough to know what to skip.

So the interesting question isn't "what can AI do for huge enterprises?" Huge enterprises already had enterprise software. The interesting question is: who was locked out of custom software before, and can they have it now?

The answer, for us, is: pretty much everyone we talked to growing up.

The businesses we actually want to work with

India has this enormous bench of family-run businesses (service firms, manufacturers, distributors, traders) that have compounded wealth over decades. Real businesses with real customers and real operations. The kind of businesses where three generations of the same family have been building the thing.

None of them bought custom software. The ones who tried either paid a multinational too much money for too little, or got burned by a dev shop that couldn't ship. So they ran their operations on WhatsApp groups, Excel files, Tally, and whatever vertical SaaS was cheapest.

That's the space. Not greenfield startups. Not dev-first companies. Operators with real businesses and real wealth who never had an affordable path to software that actually fit how they work.

And the same pattern holds globally. Every market has a middle layer of businesses too small for enterprise vendors and too bespoke for template SaaS. Until now, they had no good option. Now they do.

What we actually do

Three lines of work, scoped against whatever's breaking your week:

1. Build. Custom web apps and websites. Customer portals, internal tools, quoting engines, booking systems, marketing sites that convert. Modern stack, documented, yours.

2. Automate. AI agents and automations that take the repetitive stuff off your team's desk. Inbox triage, lead enrichment, proposal drafting, reporting, admin workflows. The stuff that quietly eats senior hours.

3. Grow. AI-first marketing and content ops. The same stack we run inside our own content agency: content systems, outbound sequences, editorial loops, landing pages. For businesses that want a marketing engine that compounds, not a freelancer carousel.

Agency-grade craft. SMB pricing. A free Fit Call to figure out where to start, a written assessment, and then we ship.

Why it's priced the way it is

The honest answer: because we can. Because AI made it possible to do real software work at margins that used to only exist at enterprise scale. Because most of the dev-shop pricing in India was packaging inefficiency as a line item, and we don't have to.

But also: because the only way this works at scale is if we stay honest about what the engagement is. We're not pitching you a ₹40 lakh "digital transformation." We're pitching you one focused build, one area of your business, shipped in weeks. If that's too big a step, don't hire us. If it's too small, also don't hire us. We'd rather get the scope right than get the sale.

Where the Workshop fits

We also run workshops, but not on a monthly schedule. On demand, for fellow builders and entrepreneurs who want to learn the craft themselves, or for teams whose manager wants a targeted, practitioner-technical training session. You book, we scope the session to your room, we show up and walk real builds.

That's it. That's the whole offer. Two doors: hire us to build it, or book us to teach your room how to build it.

The thing we're actually betting on

That most of the interesting custom software in the next decade will be built not for Fortune 500s, but for the businesses underneath them: the ones with real cash flow and real problems who were priced out of bespoke software for the last twenty years. That the people who win this market will be small, senior, and honest about scope. That AI is the multiplier that finally makes the math work for both sides.

If you run one of those businesses, you now have an option you didn't have two years ago. That's the thesis. The work is just what it looks like to execute on it.

• Puro