Core Shift StudiosBelfast
Software shaped around the work that matters.
Bespoke software and websites for charities, community groups and small businesses across Northern Ireland. Built in Belfast, around the way you work.
The problem
Most small
organisations are
buried in admin.
The mission gets squeezed by everything that surrounds it. Paperwork that lives in cabinets. Spreadsheets that only one person understands. Information that walks out the door when a colleague leaves. The work that matters loses to the work that shouldn’t exist.
Paper records that get lost
Files in cabinets, signatures on photocopies, version control by hand-written initials. Compliance becomes a memory test.
Spreadsheets that quietly break
One unprotected workbook, one accidental sort, one staff change, and the institutional record is silently corrupted.
Knowledge stuck in heads
Process lives in the longest-serving person's memory. When they leave, the team rebuilds from fragments.
What we do
Bespoke software,
built end-to-end.
Not a SaaS product, not a template. A system designed around the specific way your organisation actually works, and then maintained as your work changes.
Discovery
We sit with the people doing the work. Caseworkers, fundraisers, finance leads, volunteers, whoever the system will actually serve. The brief comes out of that, not before it.
Design
Information architecture before interface. We'd rather draw the right system on paper than ship the wrong one in code.
Build
Modern stack, type-safe, properly tested. Two-week iterations with your team in the loop the whole way. No black boxes, no surprise invoices, no “trust us, it's coming.”
Deliver
Migration, training, documentation, handover. The unglamorous work that determines whether a system actually gets used or quietly dies on a shelf.
The maths
Bespoke is finally
an option.
Charities and small businesses have been sold one answer: SaaS. Salesforce, HubSpot, Dynamics, sector platforms built on top of them. Enterprise seats run £45 to £200+ per user per month. A 30-person organisation can be looking at £30k to £60k a year, every year, forever, scaling the wrong way as the organisation grows.
Bespoke was assumed to be worse. Traditional agency pricing put custom builds at £60k to £200k, so smaller organisations ruled them out. That assumption is now wrong. AI-assisted development has changed the economics: builds that used to need six-figure budgets can be delivered for a fraction of that, properly, not cheaply.
The system is yours. Built around how your organisation actually works. No per-seat fees, no annual licence renewals, no platform holding your data hostage when you decide to leave.
A Core Shift build
From £5,495
A one-off fixed price, agreed before you commit. Owned outright, with no per-seat fees, no ongoing fee and no annual licence, and we help you write it into a funding bid.
Also from Core Shift
Need a website?
£0 upfront.
We design and build a bespoke site for your organisation or business with nothing to pay upfront. Then it’s from £49 a month for hosting and looking after it, with a 12-month minimum term.
Selected work
In the field.
Live software on the app stores, and systems in daily use with the organisations they were built for.
The person behind it
Core Shift is run by Bobby Marno, who has spent years building software, websites and apps across a range of sectors, for organisations from small teams to large ones.
06 / Start a conversation
Start with a conversation, not a contract.
A free, no-obligation conversation about where your team’s work gets stuck and what a system built around it could do, with a rough sense of cost. The thinking is yours to keep.