Sector A · Technology

Products people open every day.

We build consumer apps and the services behind them. The standard is simple to state and hard to meet: it works the first time, on the phone in someone's hand, wherever they happen to be.

A hand holding a phone above a table, its camera pointed down at a card.
Fig. 03A phone, a card, poor light — where the product is judged

The part people see is a screen. The part that earns their trust is everything behind it.

A consumer product is a promise repeated thousands of times a day. We engineer the whole chain that keeps it: the interface, the API, the data it depends on and the monitoring that tells us when any link weakens.

01 Focus areas

Where we spend our time.

Four kinds of work that turn up in almost every consumer product we touch.

01

Consumer mobile apps

iOS and Android apps built from one codebase, with the details that decide whether people keep them: fast start, offline tolerance, clear onboarding, honest paywalls.

  • Onboarding and sign-in
  • Camera and on-device features
  • Accessibility from the start
02

Subscriptions and commerce

In-app purchases, entitlements that stay correct across devices, and pricing derived from real unit economics rather than guesswork.

  • App Store and Google Play billing
  • Server-side entitlements
  • Unit-economics modelling
03

Recognition and data products

Image recognition, catalog search and market data pipelines, with every figure labelled by where it came from and how fresh it is.

  • Computer vision
  • Catalog and pricing data
  • Provenance on every number
04

Cloud platforms

APIs, scheduled jobs, storage and hosting on managed cloud services. Vendor keys stay on the server, usage has a budget, and costs are reported.

  • Serverless APIs
  • Quota and cost guards
  • Monitoring and alerts
02 Scope

What a build usually includes.

The line items that appear in most consumer projects we scope. Yours will differ; the written scope is where that gets settled.

  • Interface design for every screen, and a prototype you can tap through before code starts
  • One codebase for iOS and Android, submitted to both stores under your account or ours
  • Subscriptions or one-off purchases, with entitlements that survive a reinstall or a new phone
  • The API, database and scheduled jobs behind the app, on managed cloud services
  • Analytics limited to a named allowlist, and a monthly running cost you can predict
  • Installable builds from the third week, so you are never waiting to see progress

Not included by default

Brand identity, marketing sites, content production and paid acquisition. We will happily work alongside the people doing those, and we will say so in the scope rather than quietly assuming someone else has it.

03 In practice

Mintproof, a Base One product.

A collector's tool for trading cards. Point a phone at a card to identify the exact printing, see what it is worth, estimate a grade, and keep a running value for the whole binder.

  • Identifies the exact printing of a card from a phone photo, in English and Japanese
  • Shows market prices with the source and date of each figure stated
  • Tracks the value of a whole collection over time
  • Free and paid tiers through App Store and Google Play subscriptions

Contact

Building a consumer product?

Tell us what you are building, or what is not working. We will reply with a plain answer about whether and how we can help.