Services / Software development / Galway
Software development in Galway
Galway splits neatly in two for us: med-tech companies out at Parkmore and Ballybrit who need software, and tourism, hospitality and retail businesses in the city who need to be found. We do both from the same team.
Most businesses do not run on their software. They run on a spreadsheet somebody rebuilt on a Sunday, an inbox doing the job of a database, and one person who knows where everything is. That works until it is the thing standing between you and the next fifty customers. We build the system that replaces it — scoped in two weeks, delivered in fortnightly slices you can click, handed over with the repository.
TYPICAL START
2 weeks
ENGAGEMENT FROM
€99
COUNTY
County Galway
CALL
+353 89 255 9931
EMAIL
info@mavstechnologies.com
Who we do this for in Galway
Med-tech and life sciences, tourism and hospitality, marine and agri, and a strong independent retail scene in the city centre.
Recent clients include ADS Design Studio, Greenwich Sandwiches and Bar, LocaToca Restropub, Stillorgan Gas and Electrical and Emmanuel Motors.
ALSO COVERED FROM GALWAY
Oranmore · Salthill · Knocknacarra · Barna · Athenry · Tuam
IS THIS YOU?
Is this you?
None of these is a technology problem yet. They are all the same problem: a job that runs on a person remembering to do it. Every one of them is a fortnight of somebody’s month, and every one of them is fixable — sometimes with software we did not write.
TRY THIS FIRST
Before you pay anyone to build this
Quite a lot of what reaches us does not need a project. It needs a tool that already exists, set up properly once. These are free to start, we have put clients on every one of them, and none of them pays us a penny for saying so.
AUTOMATE THE SPREADSHEET YOU ALREADY HAVE
The sheet is not the enemy — the manual steps around it are. Apps Script is free with any Google account and will send the email, build the PDF, tidy the columns and run on a schedule without anyone opening the file.
Outgrow it when: Stops being sensible once more than a handful of people edit at once, or a mistake is expensive to undo.
A REAL DATABASE THAT LOOKS LIKE A SPREADSHEET
Free tier. Gives you the thing a spreadsheet cannot: proper records, links between tables, forms that write straight into it, and different views of the same data for different people.
Outgrow it when: The bill and the slowdown both arrive together, somewhere north of 50,000 records or serious per-user permissions.
FORMS THAT FEED SOMETHING
Free, unlimited forms that look like they belong on your site and drop straight into a sheet or Airtable. Replaces most of what a bespoke intake form gets built for.
Outgrow it when: It collects; it does not decide. Once the answer has to trigger logic and payment, you have outgrown it.
MAKE TWO SYSTEMS TALK
Free tiers on both. Nine times in ten, "we need an integration" means moving one record from one place to another when something happens — which is a twenty-minute job here, not a sprint.
Outgrow it when: Gets expensive and hard to debug at volume. When a failed run costs you an order, it needs to be code you own.
THE WIKI, THE TRACKER, THE HANDOVER DOC
Free for small teams. The fastest way to get process out of one person’s head and somewhere the rest of the company can read it — which is often the actual problem behind "we need a system".
Outgrow it when: It is documentation with a database attached. It will not enforce anything, and it is not where customer data should live.
DASHBOARDS ON THE DATA YOU ALREADY HAVE
Open source and free to run yourself. Point it at your database, and the monthly report someone assembles by hand becomes a page that is already correct when they open it.
Outgrow it when: Someone has to host it and keep it patched. That someone can be us, on a retainer, or your own team.
Genuinely: if one of these solves it, we will set it up with you for nothing — an hour on a call, your data in, your team shown how. We would rather be the people who told you the truth than the people who sold you a six-week build you did not need. Come back when you have outgrown it, because that is when we are actually worth the money.
Ask which one fitsThree kinds of work
Custom web applications
Customer portals, dashboards, booking and quoting flows, multi-tenant platforms. We build on a deliberately boring stack — React or Next on the front, Node or Python behind it, Postgres underneath — because the next developer to open this codebase should not need a guided tour, and because boring technology is the kind you can still hire for in four years.
Internal tools that replace the spreadsheet
Approvals, inventory, scheduling, the monthly report someone still assembles by hand. Most of the work here is rarely the interface. It is the integrations: your CRM, your accounting system, and the API nobody has documented since the person who wrote it left. We start by watching somebody do the job for an hour, because the real process is never the one in the flowchart.
Rescue and maintenance
You inherited a codebase and the people who wrote it are gone. We read it, write down what it actually does, stabilise the parts that wake someone up at night, and give you a straight answer on whether it is worth keeping or cheaper to rebuild. The answer is "keep it" more often than anyone expects.
HOW IT RUNS
What actually happens after you get in touch
Nobody hires a development team because they enjoy the process, so here it is in full — what each stage produces, how long it takes, and what you are holding at the end of it. There is no stage of this where the work is invisible to you for a month.
1
Week 0 — a call, and a straight answer
Twenty minutes on what the job is and what it costs you today. Some of these end with us pointing at a tool from the shelf above and no invoice at all. If it is a build, you get a rough range before anyone talks about a contract — a range, honestly held, beats a precise number invented to win the work.
2
Weeks 1–2 — paid discovery
We watch somebody do the job for an hour, write down what the process really is, and wireframe the main flows. It ends in a written scope, a technical approach and an estimate with an honest range on it. Fixed fee, agreed up front, and the document is yours whether or not we build the thing — it is deliberately detailed enough to take to someone else.
3
Fortnightly — slices you can click
Every two weeks something real lands on a staging URL you can open on your own phone. You steer from working software rather than from a status report, and the estimate is re-forecast in front of you when the scope moves, not quietly absorbed until the end.
4
Launch, then handover
The repository has been in your organisation since the first commit, so launch day is a deploy rather than a transfer. You get the runbook, the architecture written down in plain English, and a walk-through recorded for whoever joins next. Then either your team takes it, or we stay on a rolling monthly retainer with 30 days’ notice.
One thing we do not do: quote a fixed price against a vague scope. You would pay for the padding, we would spend the build defending the boundary, and both of us would be in a change-request argument by week six. Discovery exists so the number is real.
Questions Galway clients ask
Our business is seasonal. Does that suit paid advertising?
It suits it well, provided the budget moves with the season rather than sitting flat all year. We plan Galway tourism accounts around the shoulder months, where the margin usually is.
Do you do Irish-language websites?
Yes, and with Gaeltacht areas on the doorstep it comes up more here than anywhere else. Both versions get proper hreflang so they do not compete with each other in search.
Can you help us take bookings directly instead of through platforms?
That is one of the most common briefs we get in Galway. It is part build, part marketing — the direct channel only works if the site converts and something is driving people to it.
Who owns the code?
You do, from the first commit. The repository sits in your organisation on your cloud account. There is no licence to renew and nothing to buy back if you decide to work with someone else.
Can you work alongside our own developers?
Usually, yes — it tends to go best when we take a clearly defined slice rather than sharing every file. Our commits go through your review process like anyone else’s.
What happens after launch?
Either your team takes it, or we stay on a rolling monthly retainer with 30 days’ notice. We would rather do that than sell you a support contract with an SLA neither of us would ever enforce.
Let's talk about your Galway project.
Send a paragraph about what you need built. You will hear back within one working day from whoever would actually run the work — and if a trip to Galway is the quickest way to understand it, we will come to you.
Start the conversation