The studio
The studio.
A studio for the work that doesn’t fit a template.
Core Shift Studios builds bespoke software for charities, social enterprises, small businesses, and umbrella bodies. Every build is made from scratch around the actual workflow of the team that will use it.
Why bespoke
Charities and small businesses have been sold one answer to their software problem: SaaS. Salesforce. HubSpot. Dynamics. Sector-specific platforms built on top of them. Consultants recommend them. Boards, funders and accountants sign them off because they look like the safe choice.
The maths rarely holds. Enterprise platforms list at £45 to £200+ per user per month, before integration, implementation, and platform fees. A 30-person organisation can be looking at £30k–£60k a year, every year, forever, scaling the wrong way as the organisation grows. Mid-tier sector platforms still run £30–£80 per seat per month with the same structural problem.
So most organisations don’t fully commit. They license a platform for a few users and run the rest of the work on spreadsheets that only one person understands, SharePoint folders organised by whoever set them up in 2019, paper files, and institutional knowledge that walks out the door when a colleague leaves. The real cost isn’t the licence. It’s the hours lost to manual reconciliation, the reports cobbled together from four sources, the compliance risk no one has time to fix.
Bespoke is assumed to be worse. The logic is intuitive: if SaaS is already too expensive, custom-built software must be out of the question. Traditional agency pricing reinforced that: £60k–£80k for smaller systems, £200k or more for mid-range builds. Bespoke was for organisations that could afford it. Charities and small firms mostly couldn’t.
That assumption is now wrong. AI-assisted development has changed the economics. Builds that used to require six-figure budgets and twelve-month timelines can be delivered for a fraction of that, properly, not cheaply. The system is yours. It’s built around how your organisation actually works. There are no per-seat fees, no annual licence renewals, no platforms holding your data hostage when you decide to leave.
For most small organisations, the question isn’t whether bespoke is better than SaaS. It’s whether anyone has shown them that bespoke is finally an option.
Funding shouldn’t be the barrier
We help you build the case for it inside a funding bid.
The language funders respond to, the outcomes that justify investment, the cost framing that makes commissioning bespoke software a defensible line in a grant application. The build is one conversation. Paying for it is a separate one we can support.
What it costs
You never bet the whole budget at once.
An engagement is a staircase. Each step is small, fixed, and earns the next, so you can stop with something useful in hand at any point.
Discovery
An hour mapping where the work gets stuck and what a system around it would look like. You leave with a clear read on what could be built and roughly what it costs. No obligation.
Scoping
A short, paid phase that produces the spec and a clickable prototype you can put in front of your board. You see exactly what you would be commissioning before you commit to building it.
Build
The full build, delivered in two-week iterations and phased so the organisation never bets its whole budget at once. Each step earns the next.
Discovery is free. Scoping is a small fixed fee. Full builds typically start from £5,495, agreed as a fixed price before you commit, and we help you write it into a funding bid.
What we believe
Software should serve the mission, not survive it.
Most small organisations build their work around their software. We build the other way round.
Sector knowledge isn't optional.
We work only with organisations whose context we understand, in the third sector and small business alike. We've sat in SMTs, written board papers, navigated funder reporting, and lived the operational reality of running lean. That context shows up in every decision the software makes.
Long relationships, not transactions.
Software is alive. We stay involved after launch on terms that suit the organisation's reality: light-touch retainer, defined enhancement budgets, or call-when-you-need-us. We don't ship and vanish.
Start here
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.