How We Consult
No slideware. Working answers.
Most technology advice fails at the handover: a strategy deck lands, the consultants leave, and the team discovers the plan can't be built at the assumed budget. We keep advice and delivery in the same hands. If we recommend it, we can build it — and we've priced it as though we will.
Our Offerings
Where we're most useful.
Platform & Vendor Selection
Structured evaluation of the two or three realistic options against your actual requirements, team skills and five-year cost — not a feature matrix copied from marketing sites.
Architecture Review
An independent read of your current architecture: what will break first under growth, what's over-engineered, and what to do about each in priority order.
Build vs Buy
An honest answer, including when the honest answer is buy. We model licence cost against build and maintenance cost over a realistic horizon.
Technical Due Diligence
Code, architecture, security and team assessment for acquisitions, investments or a new CTO's first ninety days — findings ranked by what actually threatens the business.
Cost & Licence Rationalization
Cloud spend, tool sprawl and licence renewals reviewed against usage. This one frequently pays for the engagement.
Delivery Assessment
Why releases are slow or unpredictable — traced through the pipeline, the branching model, the test suite and the handoffs, with fixes sequenced by payback.
Engagement Model
How an engagement runs.
Frame
A short conversation to agree the decision you're trying to make and what evidence would settle it. If we're the wrong people, we say so here.
Investigate
Interviews, code and architecture review, data gathering. We talk to the engineers doing the work, not only the managers describing it.
Analyze
Options modeled against cost, risk, time and your team's capacity to absorb change.
Recommend
A short written recommendation with the reasoning, the discarded options and what we'd do first. Written to be read by both your CFO and your engineers.
Support
We stay available through implementation — whether your team builds it, we build it, or a third party does.
Deliverables
What you actually receive.
Written Recommendation
A concise document stating the decision, the reasoning and the trade-offs — including what we'd want to be wrong about.
Costed Options
Each option with build effort, run cost and the assumptions underneath, so finance can sanity-check the numbers.
Reference Architecture
Diagrams and component choices at enough detail to start building against.
Risk Register
What can go wrong, how likely, how bad, and the cheapest way to reduce each one.
Sequenced Roadmap
The order of work, with dependencies and the earliest points where value lands.
Walkthrough Session
A working session with your team — questions answered live, not routed through an account manager.
Why PineApps
What makes this different.
Engineers, Not Analysts
The people advising you have shipped the kind of system being discussed, in the last year.
Numbers, Not Adjectives
Every recommendation carries effort, run cost and risk — "scalable" is not a plan.
No Vendor Kickbacks
We hold no reseller agreements. When we recommend a platform, that's the only reason we're recommending it.
Right-Sized Advice
We build for growing businesses. You'll get the architecture your traffic justifies, not the one a bank needs.
Have a decision to make?
Describe the choice you're weighing and we'll tell you — free, in one call — whether it needs a consulting engagement at all.