Web Development
Custom web applications
built to be maintained, not replaced
We design and build web platforms for SMEs, operations teams, and product companies — with a stack and a process your in-house engineers can pick up later.
What "web development" means when a real business hires us
Most of the web projects we take on are not brochure sites. They are the piece of software a company runs its day on. A booking platform. A multi-location POS dashboard. An operations portal that sits between a warehouse, an ERP, and a customer-facing storefront. The brief is rarely "make a website" — it is almost always "we are losing hours to spreadsheets and email, and we need a real system."
That framing shapes everything. We scope around the workflow first and the screens second. We write the data model on a whiteboard before we open Figma. We ask who owns the data, who is allowed to change it, and what happens when the person who currently keeps it in their head goes on holiday. Only after that do we start on UI.
If what you actually need is a marketing site, we will tell you so and point you at a cheaper, faster option. Our engagements start to make sense somewhere north of "form that emails us" and below "we are building our own cloud provider."
Our default stack (and why)
Our default for business web apps is Laravel on PHP with PostgreSQL as the database, Inertia or Livewire for the interactive layer, and Tailwind for styling. For customer-facing products where we need server components, streaming, and tight frontend control, we switch to Next.js with Prisma and a PostgreSQL or managed MySQL backend. Deployment sits on Hetzner, DigitalOcean, or Hostinger VPS instances for smaller budgets, or on AWS / GCP when the client needs it.
We did not pick these because they are trendy. We picked them because they let two or three engineers ship something real in a quarter and still hand it off to a four-person in-house team a year later. Laravel has a huge hiring pool and an opinionated structure for permissions, background jobs, queues, notifications, and admin tooling. Next.js has the tightest frontend ecosystem right now. PostgreSQL gets out of the way until you actually need to tune something, which is the correct behaviour for a database.
We also keep a short list of things we deliberately avoid on client projects: bleeding-edge framework releases in their first minor version, obscure ORMs with tiny communities, and "no-code" platforms priced per workflow that end up costing more than hosting and scale worse than a boring Laravel monolith. Boring is a feature.
What is included in a typical engagement
Every web project ships with the same baseline regardless of scope: a written architecture document, a staging environment that mirrors production, automated database migrations, at least a smoke-level test suite, structured error logging, and a first-pass role-and-permissions model. If you ever need to fire us, none of those artefacts require any further help from DevLK to understand.
On the build side we handle product discovery and wireframes, UI and brand-aligned design, backend and frontend implementation, third-party API integrations (payments, shipping, ERPs, identity providers), deployment pipelines, and a documented handover. Copy-writing, ongoing SEO, paid media, and brand work are not part of a default web engagement — we partner with specialists for those instead of pretending to be a full agency.
After launch, we offer maintenance packages that cover patching, minor feature work, and uptime / security monitoring. Clients are never locked into these — we are comfortable handing the codebase to your own team once the product is stable.
Timelines and how we price web projects
For context on timing: a sharp internal tool with one or two user roles, 15–25 screens, a couple of integrations, and a clean admin area usually takes 8–14 weeks from kickoff. A customer-facing product with payments, authentication, email flows, analytics, and a mobile-responsive marketing surface is typically 14–22 weeks. Truly large platforms — multi-tenant SaaS, multi-country deployments, complex permission trees — are scoped as programs and broken into 6-to-10-week phases.
We price in one of two ways. For well-scoped projects with a clear brief, we offer a fixed-scope, fixed-price quote after a paid discovery (typically one to two weeks). For evolving products where the scope is genuinely a moving target, we work on monthly retainers tied to a committed engineer count and a rolling backlog. Both models are written out in plain English before we start.
What we do not do is hourly billing without a budget cap, "maybe 3 weeks" estimates, or scope by vibes. If we cannot quote confidently, we will say so and propose a short paid discovery to get there.
Web Development FAQ
Straight answers to the questions
buyers actually ask us
Can you take over a web app another agency built?
Yes, and we do it often. We start with a one-week paid audit: we get read-only repo access, inventory the stack, grade the test coverage and deploy process, list the top technical risks, and write a stabilisation plan. At the end of that week you have an honest document you can keep — including whether we think a rewrite, a refactor, or a focused fix is the better use of your money.
Do we own the code, the design files, and the hosting accounts?
Always. The repository lives in your GitHub or GitLab organisation from day one. Design files live in your Figma. Hosting, DNS, domains, Stripe, email providers, and all third-party accounts are created in your name — not ours. We get invited in as collaborators. If the relationship ends, we remove ourselves; nothing moves.
How do you handle changes mid-project without a scope blow-out?
Each sprint ends with a written change-log and an explicit "what would we add or drop?" conversation. Small changes are absorbed inside the committed scope. Big changes get a short impact note — cost, time, risk — and a decision from you before anything moves. We never quietly expand scope and then send a surprise invoice.
What about performance, SEO, and accessibility?
Performance and accessibility are in-scope by default on customer-facing work: Core Web Vitals budgets, keyboard navigation, semantic HTML, reasonable colour contrast, and proper document structure. Technical SEO (metadata, canonical tags, sitemap, structured data) is included. Content SEO — keyword research, editorial calendar, link building — is not; we hand that off to a specialist if needed.
Will our in-house engineers be able to work on this later?
That is a design constraint, not an afterthought. We use conventional directory layouts, standard Laravel or Next.js idioms, write readable migrations, and keep the architecture doc up to date. Before handover we record a short walk-through video per major area and do a live Q&A with your team.
Do you sign NDAs, DPAs, and vendor security paperwork?
Yes. NDAs are standard on discovery calls. For engagements touching personal data, we sign a Data Processing Agreement before access is granted. For enterprise clients we also complete vendor security questionnaires and can scope regional hosting (EU, UK, APAC) when data-residency rules require it.
Talk to an engineer
Ready to scope your web project?
Book a 45-minute discovery call. We will review what you are trying to build, sketch an architecture, and tell you honestly whether we are the right team — no pitch deck, no sales engineer middleman.