We build software to order.

Custom software

Most businesses have one job that everyone does by hand because no product fits it properly. A spreadsheet that four people edit in turn. A folder of files that has to be renamed, converted and filed the same way every week. A report someone rebuilds every month from the same three exports.

Those are small programs. They’re just small programs nobody sells, because the market for them is one company. That’s the work we take on — the tool that fits your process instead of asking you to change it.

The five apps in the directory are the same discipline pointed at problems common enough to give away: a PDF editor, a video trimmer, a photo printer, a phone importer, a parametric CAD tool. Desktop software that installs, runs locally, and keeps its files in formats other programs can read.

Co-development

Sometimes you don’t need a new thing built — you need the thing you have to move faster. We work alongside an existing team: taking a feature end to end, clearing the backlog nobody has time for, untangling the part of the codebase everyone routes around.

That means fitting your conventions rather than importing ours: your stack, your review process, your branch strategy. If the code that comes back doesn’t look like the code around it, we’ve done it wrong.

Game development

Unsubbedware was founded by developers who came up through games. That’s where the habits behind these tools were formed — frame budgets, tight loops, tools built for the people sitting next to you, and shipping to a date.

We take game development contracts: gameplay and tools programming, prototypes and vertical slices, and porting or performance work on a project already in motion. Engine and pipeline work rather than art or design — if you need a team to make your game for you, we’re not that. If you need engineers on part of it, we are.

You own what we build

This site exists because software stopped belonging to the people paying for it. Paid work runs on the same principle, and it’s the part worth reading twice:

• You get the source. Full repository, history included, at handover — not a compiled artefact and a support contract.
• No lock-in by construction. No runtime that phones us, no licence key we can switch off, no hosting you have to rent from us to keep the thing working.
• You can walk. Another developer picking it up afterwards is a normal outcome, not a punishment. The handover is written assuming it.
• Boring, documented stacks. Chosen so you can hire for them, not so they’re interesting to us.

Being straight about who you’d be hiring

Unsubbedware is small, and you would be dealing directly with the person writing your code — no account manager, no layer in between. For the kind of work above that’s usually the point: decisions happen in one conversation instead of three.

It also means scale has limits. We take on work a small, focused team can actually finish. If your project needs thirty people, we’ll say so early rather than take the deposit and find out together.

The evidence is the apps. They’re free, they’re installable today, and you can judge the work before speaking to anyone — which is a better reference than a page of logos.