Working software beats a demo
A screen that passes a test and a screen a person can use are two different claims. We do not tell you something works until we have opened it and done the thing you would do.
About
A small company, in Bern.
Tiff Software Solutions is a small software company in Bern, led by Kani Tifeki. We design, build, host and look after software for small businesses — usually all four, because handing those between people is where most of it goes wrong.
What we do, plainly
We build the system a business runs on, and the website in front of it. Most of our work is one of two shapes: an application that holds records a business cannot afford to lose, or a site that has to be fast, findable and easy for the owner to change.
The projects we like most are the ones where those two meet — where a thing typed into the office in the morning should appear in public by itself, and where exactly which parts of it appear is a decision somebody has to make carefully.
How we got here
We have spent years on the unglamorous side of small business technology: domains, hosting, email that actually arrives, sites that were built by somebody else and then abandoned. It is a good education. You learn quickly which decisions cost someone money three years later, and you stop making them.
Our own product, Tiff Cardealer, came out of exactly that. A family dealership needed a system nobody sold; the useful version of it turned out to be one that keeps their figures on their own machine and publishes only what a customer should see. It is now sold to other dealerships.
How we charge
A fixed price for a defined piece of work, agreed before anything starts, so you are never surprised by an invoice. Longer arrangements — hosting, maintenance, the ongoing care of something we built — are a flat monthly fee you can end at any time.
You own the accounts, the domains and the code. Nothing we set up should be hard to take somewhere else, and if it ever is, that is a fault rather than a business model.
How we work
Three things that do not change.
Write down why, not what
Every project we hand over comes with the reasoning behind its decisions, not just the code that resulted. The next person — including us in six months — needs to know which trade-offs were made on purpose.
Small, and staying that way
We take on few clients so that the people who wrote your system are the people who answer when you write. Growing past that would change the only thing that makes this worth hiring.
Worth a conversation?
The first one costs nothing and is usually the most useful part of the project.