catalyst4

A small agency, on purpose.

We started catalyst4 after years inside larger consultancies watching straightforward projects take a year and cost seven figures. The people who most need good software are usually the ones who can least afford that. So we work the other way round.

What that means

Small team, so you talk directly to the people building your product and nothing gets lost between an account manager and a developer you never meet.

Fixed prices, so you can plan around a number rather than a burn rate. We take on the risk of estimating badly; you shouldn't have to.

A boring stack, chosen because we've used it a hundred times and know exactly how it fails. Nobody learns a new framework on your budget. Your product is not our experiment.

Weekly ships, because a live thing you can click on tells you more than any status report, and because it means the last week of a project looks like every other week rather than a scramble.

Samson and Goliath, the Harland & Wolff gantry cranes, above a brick wall in east Belfast

In numbers

Founded
2024
Based
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Team
Three engineers, one designer
Projects shipped
Fourteen and counting
Typical project
Four to eight weeks
Projects at once
Never more than two

Who we work with

A good fit

  • Startups from idea to Series A
  • Small businesses outgrowing spreadsheets and off-the-shelf tools
  • Founders with a clear problem and a real deadline
  • Teams who need a second pair of hands for a few months

Probably not

  • Enterprise procurement cycles
  • Twelve-month roadmaps fixed on day one
  • Anything that needs a committee to say yes

How a project goes

  1. A short call. Thirty minutes to understand what you need and whether we're the right people to build it.
  2. A fixed quote within two working days. Scope, price and timeline in plain English. If it changes, we tell you before it costs you.
  3. Something you can use every week. We ship to a live environment from the first week. You see progress, not status reports.
  4. Handover, with the code yours. Clean repository, documentation, and help hiring or onboarding whoever takes it on next.

Have something in mind? Tell us about it.

A sentence or two is plenty. We reply within a working day.