Capabilities
What Modernaut builds
Mobile apps and custom software, from the first sketch through to the thing running in production with real people using it.
Taking one new project for Q4. Reach out.
Taking one new project for Q4. Reach out.
Mobile apps and custom software, from the first sketch through to the thing running in production with real people using it.
Listed in rough order of how often they come up. Nearly every project is a combination of at least three. Every project can include branding, UI/UX and start-to-finish development.
Native iOS and Android from a single React Native and Expo codebase. The visible part is the interface. The part that decides whether an app ships is everything underneath it: push notifications that survive both APNs and FCM, sensible offline behaviour, hardware-backed key storage, background tasks that the operating system does not quietly kill, and a store submission that clears review the first time.
Full-stack products in TypeScript, usually on Next.js, AdonisJS or plain Node with Postgres. Authentication, subscription billing, role-based permissions, queued background work, and an admin interface your team can operate without specialist support. The goal is a product you own outright, not a dependency on its original build team.
Headless and hybrid CMS work across Payload, WordPress, Drupal and hand-rolled solutions. Modular page building that editors use without a training session, structured content that does not collapse the first time marketing wants a new layout, and a publishing workflow with previews, revisions and translations that people actually use.
OpenAI and Anthropic integrations, agentic tooling and MCP servers, built where they measurably save someone time. Modernaut has shipped AI into editorial workflows and product features since the first usable APIs — and will say when a feature would be better as a form, a filter, or nothing at all. Most proposed AI features are one of those three.
Stripe, Shopify Hydrogen, WooCommerce and Medusa. Checkout flows, subscriptions, and the parts nobody demos: tax edge cases, partial refunds, failed webhooks, fulfilment that has to reconcile with a warehouse system, and the reporting your finance person will ask for in month two.
Inherited a codebase nobody wants to open? This is a large share of the work. Auditing legacy applications, migrating content and functionality off platforms that are being sunset, replacing the parts that are genuinely broken while leaving the parts that merely look old, and getting Core Web Vitals and WCAG 2.2 AA back to green without a full rebuild.
The same four steps whether the job is a two-week rescue or a six-month build, so you always know what is done and what is next.
Half an hour to work out what you actually need, which is often not what the brief says. No charge, no deck, no discovery invoice.
A short document naming what gets built, what deliberately does not, what it costs and when it lands. If we do not agree here, you have spent nothing.
A staging URL from the first week and a standing weekly update. You watch it take shape rather than waiting for a reveal at the end.
Docs, a recorded walkthrough, and the repo in your account under your name. Any qualified team can take it from there. Continued support is an option, not a dependency.
Most work is fixed price against a written scope, so the number is agreed before anything starts. Full builds typically begin around $2,000; audits and rescues are considerably smaller.
The common one. A written scope names what gets built, what deliberately does not, the price and the date, then it gets built for that price. Suits a first version, a specific product, or a defined piece of a larger system.
A standing monthly commitment for work that doesn't end: a shipped product that needs continued development, or a team that wants a senior engineer attached to a workstream. Priced monthly against agreed hours rather than per feature.
Someone else built it and it is now slow, fragile, or nobody left knows how it works. A short engagement produces a written assessment of what is actually wrong and what it would take to fix; useful on its own, whoever does the fixing.
The questions that come up in nearly every first call.
Most work is fixed price against a written scope, so you know the number before anything starts. Small rescues and audits usually land in the low thousands; a full mobile app or SaaS build is a larger conversation that depends entirely on scope. Hourly is available for open-ended or ongoing work.
A focused first version with a real backend behind it is typically 1-2 weeks.
Often, yes. Sometimes that is as the senior engineer on a specific piece of work, sometimes it is reviewing architecture and mentoring the people who will maintain it. Writing standards and process documentation for in-house teams has been a large part of the last decade.
Yes, when the work can be defined as a clear product or technical workstream alongside your existing team. Projects that require several parallel delivery teams need a different engagement model; Modernaut identifies that during scoping rather than understaffing the work.
Branding, interface and interaction design, yes; the site you are reading was designed here. Modernaut also works comfortably from an existing design system or your designer’s Figma files.
Maine, in the US Eastern timezone. Work is remote, which has been the arrangement with clients in Boston, New York and further afield for years. In-person is possible in New England when a project genuinely calls for it.
Yes, on a retainer, and it is optional rather than assumed. Everything is handed over so that another developer could pick it up cleanly; a maintenance agreement should be something you want, not something you're locked into.
Describe the problem in a couple of sentences. You'll get a direct assessment of whether Modernaut should take it and roughly what the work would involve.