Custom software, Sugar Land Texas
Your business alreadywrote the software.It is trapped in aspreadsheet.
Years of pricing logic, rules, and hard-won exceptions live in a workbook that one person really understands. We turn that into a proper web application, without losing what the spreadsheet got right.
Custom built, at a price that competes with the generic SaaS subscription you would otherwise be renting forever.
01Sound familiar
You can usually tell when a spreadsheet has outgrown itself
None of these are the fault of the person who built the file. They are what happens when a tool designed for one person's analysis becomes the system of record for a whole process.
- 01
There is one workbook, and one person who genuinely understands how it works
- 02
Someone copied the master to do their own quote, then kept copying that copy, and it has been four revisions behind for a year
- 03
The workbook sits on a shared drive, so the only history is whoever saved it last
- 04
Somebody re-types the same figures into the ERP or the accounting system by hand
- 05
The process quietly stalls when the person who maintains the file is on vacation
- 06
People hired to sell or to engineer are spending their week on formatting, layout, and debugging somebody else's formulas
If you recognized more than two of those, the spreadsheet is no longer saving you time. It is holding a risk you have not priced.
Copies of a file
The chain forks once and never comes back
A copy is a new file with its own history and no recorded link to what it came from. Nothing tells the salesperson their quote is built on rules that changed four revisions ago.
One set of rules
Every quote reads the current logic
A rate change lands once and every quote written afterwards uses it. Nobody has to remember to redistribute a template, because there is no template to redistribute.
02What we build
Applications built around how your business actually works
Not a template with your logo on it. We start from the process you already run, including the parts that look strange to an outsider and exist for a good reason.
Quoting and estimating tools
Configure a scope, price it against current rates, and produce a proposal that keeps every revision.
Cost and pricing models
The calculation buried in linked cells, rebuilt as code that can be tested and explained.
Approval workflows
Who signs off, in what order, and a record of the decision instead of a chain of forwarded email.
Audit trails
Every change attributed and timestamped, so you can answer what happened two years later.
Role-based access
People see and change what their job requires, not whatever the file happens to contain.
Excel import and export
Kept deliberately. Spreadsheet-fluent people stay fast, and the application holds the truth.
Integrations
Connected to the ERP, accounting, or catalog systems you already depend on.
Real infrastructure
Managed hosting, backups, migrations, and tests that run on every change. Not a spreadsheet on a shared drive.
03Proof
Industrial manufacturer, under NDA
A business-critical process, moved off Excel
Go, Postgres, Next.js, Auth0, AWS
An industrial manufacturer ran a key business process through Excel workbooks built up over many years. The logic inside them was sound and the people who maintained them knew it well. What the workbooks could not do was say which version was authoritative, or who had changed a number and when.
Before writing any application code, we parsed the workbooks into a dependency graph: every formula, every reference, all the way down. That showed us what genuinely drove what, surfaced defects that had been sitting in the spreadsheet for years, and let us verify the rebuild against the original rather than reconstruct it from interviews.
Hover or tab a cell to inspect it
04How this is affordable
A small team, and a lot of automation
Custom software earned its reputation for being expensive: a bespoke application traditionally meant a large team billing for a long time. That is why most businesses end up settling for something generic that fits awkwardly.
We build differently. Much of our development and testing is automated, including substantial use of AI-assisted development, so a small team ships what used to take a much larger one. That saving goes into the quote rather than the margin, which is how custom work lands in the same range as a per-seat subscription.
Some of that tooling is specific to this problem. When the thing being replaced is a spreadsheet, we parse it into a dependency graph before writing code, which turns the riskiest part of the project, working out what the workbook actually does, from weeks of interviews into an analysis we can check.
That does not mean your business information gets handed around to every model on the market. Your data stays inside boundaries we agree with you up front, and if a project genuinely calls for a model-backed feature we tell you exactly what it touches before we build it.
05Consulting
Also available for advisory work
GoYugen is run by Jon Cone, previously VP Engineering at FlightAware where he led an organization of roughly 120 people across the US, UK, and India, and now also founder and CTO of Cloudline. He takes on a small number of engagements: fractional CTO work, engineering turnarounds, platform and API strategy, and technical due diligence.
Show us the spreadsheet
The quickest way to find out whether there is a project worth doing is to describe the file and what it is supposed to produce. We will give you a straight answer, including if the answer is that you should buy something off the shelf instead.