Flying hippo

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Details

Founded:
2003
Hourly Rates:
$100 - $149 / hr
Employees:
10 - 49
Avg. Project Cost:
$100,000+
Ratings:
4.4 8 Reviews

Services

  • Mobile App Development
  • Web Development
  • UI-UX Design
  • Web Design
  • Branding

Industries Served

Environmental Services Government & Public Sector Energy & Utilities Insurance Human Resources Automotive Agriculture Financial Services

Where We Specialize

13% Implementation Services
Implementation Services 13%
IT Consulting 13%
IT Services 12%
CRM Consulting 11%
ERP Consulting 11%
Game Development 10%
Bot Development 10%
Software Development 8%
AI Development 6%
Mobile App Development 3%
Testing Services 3%

Industry Expertise

Social Media100%

Typical Project Size

42% Enterprise
33% Small Business
25% Midmarket Business

About

Businesses looking for a reliable technology partner often consider Flying hippo. Their core services include Custom Software Development. Its team includes 10 - 49 specialists working across design, development, and delivery. Clients can expect pricing around $100 - $149 / hr/hr, with projects averaging about $10,000. The team is based in Des Moines, IA. This gives a quick snapshot of what to expect when working with Flying hippo.

Flying hippo Reviews

4.4 8 Reviews
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Hit a 4.7 average in the App Store within the first six weeks of release

Angus Fairbanks / Chief Digital Officer | May 30, 2026

Looking back, the thing that stands out most is how uneventful the whole project was. Technology projects of this size tend to generate their share of fire drills and awkward escalation calls. This one really didn't. Issues got flagged early enough that they never became incidents, scope changes went through an actual process instead of a tense phone call, and risks were tracked rather than just hoped away. That kind of quiet competence is unusual in my experience, and it made the whole thing feel easier on our end than I know it was on theirs.

Project summary

This project had a board-facing deadline tied to a wider strategic push. We needed a partner who'd treat that date like it was their own problem, not just ours.

  • Overall Rating 4.5
  • Quality 4.5
  • Schedule 5.0
  • Project Cost 4.5
  • Willing To Refer 5.0
Project Type:
Mobile App Development
Project Cost:
Less than $10,000
Project Duration:
Jun 2025 - Apr 2026
Business Type:
Environmental Services
Location:
Brisbane, Australia

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Coral Coast Technology is a Environmental Services business headquartered in Brisbane, Australia. As Chief Digital Officer I'm responsible for the whole technology agenda — infrastructure, product, and how we pick vendors. Every decision we make on the technology side has to tie back to a clear business case before it gets approved.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Our Mobile App Development capability had become the thing slowing everything else down. New feature requests, client asks, internal initiatives — all of it kept queuing up behind a platform that had been stretched way past what it was originally built for. We needed a proper rebuild, not another patch.
What services did the company provide for your project?
Mainly Mobile App Development, with some adjacent architecture and QA work folded in. They owned the whole thing from requirements to go-live, including hooking it into four of our existing systems. Not needing a second vendor to cover that ground was genuinely useful, both cost-wise and logistically.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
We were coming off a failed engagement and went into vendor selection this time with a lot more scrutiny. We asked pointed questions about how they handle scope changes, how they estimate, how they communicate bad news. The answers were specific and consistent across everyone we spoke to on their team, which gave us confidence it wasn't a rehearsed pitch.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Really well, partly because they already had Environmental Services experience that cut down on the amount of context we had to provide. They knew the terminology, asked the right questions, and translated our business requirements into technical specs accurately enough that development barely needed any clarification cycles.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Proactive and well-calibrated. Technical detail for the engineering side, plain summaries for the steering group, and risk flags that came with a proposed fix attached rather than just a problem statement. The biweekly sprint reviews kept our stakeholders in the loop without requiring them to sit in on every working session.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
On time and inside the approved budget. Their estimating was notably accurate — they'd broken the work down in enough detail during discovery that the forecast held up the whole way through, instead of drifting with every small change. We had exactly one change request, and it was for scope we added ourselves.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
Hard to isolate perfectly given everything else going on in the business, but the numbers we can attribute directly to the Mobile App Development work are solid: session duration up, conversion up, error rate down, and our NPS for that touchpoint has moved noticeably. Our account managers say it's coming up positively in client conversations now too.
What did you like most about working with this company?
What they did after launch. A lot of vendors treat go-live as the finish line. This team treated it as the start of a different phase — the hypercare period was substantial, the documentation held up in practice, and they checked back in at the thirty and ninety day marks to go over production metrics with us unprompted.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Yes — though I'll add that they're not the cheapest option out there and they're selective about what they take on. If price is your main filter, look elsewhere. If you need a partner you can trust with a serious Mobile App Development program in Environmental Services and expect them to actually deliver against the brief, this is the team.

Post-release incidents dropped by half within three months of this program starting

Rashid Al-Marzouqi / Chief Technology Officer | May 28, 2026

This was our fourth agency in three years, and I say that with some embarrassment. Every previous engagement had looked promising on paper and fallen apart somewhere in delivery. What was different here was the sequencing: they spent real time understanding the actual problem before proposing anything, rather than pattern-matching to a solution they already knew how to sell. The build ran to schedule, our own engineers had genuinely positive things to say during handover, and four months into live operation we haven't had a single critical incident. We're already talking about the next phase with them.

Project summary

New digital service standards required every citizen-facing application to hit accessibility and performance benchmarks our legacy systems simply couldn't reach. Patching them wasn't realistic.

  • Overall Rating 4.5
  • Quality 4.0
  • Schedule 4.5
  • Project Cost 5.0
  • Willing To Refer 5.0
Project Type:
Quality Assurance & Testing
Project Cost:
Less than $10,000
Project Duration:
Jun 2025 - Mar 2026
Business Type:
Government & Public Sector
Location:
Sharjah, UAE

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Beacon Digital Ventures has been operating in Government & Public Sector for a while now, headquartered in Sharjah, UAE. As Chief Technology Officer I sit across both strategic planning and day-to-day technology delivery. We hold our vendors to a high bar because our own clients hold us to one — it's only fair to expect the same discipline from partners.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
We had a clear product direction for our next stage of growth in Government & Public Sector, but not the internal engineering depth to actually execute it. The Quality Assurance & Testing piece specifically needed specialist skills we couldn't realistically hire for on the timeline our business plan demanded.
What services did the company provide for your project?
Mainly Quality Assurance & Testing, with some adjacent architecture and QA work folded in. They owned the whole thing from requirements to go-live, including hooking it into four of our existing systems. Not needing a second vendor to cover that ground was genuinely useful, both cost-wise and logistically.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
We shortlisted five vendors through a structured process. The technical review knocked two out right away. Of the remaining three, this team stood out because their Quality Assurance & Testing approach was specific rather than generic, backed by actual reference projects in Government & Public Sector — not just case studies pulled off a website. The reference calls confirmed everything the proposal claimed.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Really well, partly because they already had Government & Public Sector experience that cut down on the amount of context we had to provide. They knew the terminology, asked the right questions, and translated our business requirements into technical specs accurately enough that development barely needed any clarification cycles.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
The most structured project management I've dealt with from any outside vendor. Sprint planning was tight, acceptance criteria were specific, and retrospectives actually led to changes rather than just being a box to tick. The backlog and risk register were both treated as live tools, not paperwork. I never once had to chase a status update.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Yes to both. I'd quietly built in some contingency given the complexity and the number of integrations involved, and none of it ended up being needed. Delivery landed on the agreed date and the final invoice was within a rounding error of the approved budget — rarer than most people in this industry would admit.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
The ROI model we took to the board was deliberately conservative. Current performance against that model puts us on track to hit payback well ahead of the eighteen-month target we set. The operational efficiency gains in particular have outpaced the model, partly because the new platform's data quality supports decisions the old system simply couldn't.
What did you like most about working with this company?
Their willingness to just be direct. If our requirements were unclear, they said so. If our priorities contradicted each other, they explained why. If an approach we'd assumed was right actually had real downsides, they told us before we'd committed to it. That kind of honesty is exactly what I look for in a long-term partner.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Yes, no hesitation. I've already referred them twice within my own Government & Public Sector network, both times to people facing Quality Assurance & Testing problems similar to ours. I made those referrals confidently because I know the experience I had was repeatable, not a one-off stroke of luck on our project.

Pipeline stages now mirror exactly how our reps actually sell

Grayson Whitfield / VP of Engineering | May 26, 2026

What actually moved the needle wasn't their ability to follow a spec — any competent team can do that. It was their willingness to push back when a requirement didn't make sense, explain clearly why, and help us decide on something better instead. That extra layer of judgment took the final product past what we'd actually asked for and closer to what we genuinely needed, which isn't always the same thing.

Project summary

Grid modernization funding required us to prove demand-response capability. The models existed on paper — we needed engineers to actually build and run them in production.

  • Overall Rating 4.5
  • Quality 4.5
  • Schedule 4.0
  • Project Cost 4.0
  • Willing To Refer 5.0
Project Type:
CRM Development
Project Cost:
$50,000 to $149,999
Project Duration:
Jul 2025 - Mar 2026
Business Type:
Energy & Utilities
Location:
Boston, USA

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Meridian Cloud Partners has been operating in Energy & Utilities for a while now, headquartered in Boston, USA. As VP of Engineering I sit across both strategic planning and day-to-day technology delivery. We hold our vendors to a high bar because our own clients hold us to one — it's only fair to expect the same discipline from partners.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Regulation in our Energy & Utilities segment shifted and the compliance deadline came from the regulator, not from us. The scale of the CRM Development changes required justified bringing in a specialist rather than pulling our internal team off the product roadmap to handle it.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The scope ran the full CRM Development lifecycle — discovery, requirements, architecture, development across roughly a dozen sprints, integration testing, performance validation, deployment, and a four-week hypercare window afterward. They also handed over full documentation and ran a knowledge transfer session for our internal team.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
We were coming off a failed engagement and went into vendor selection this time with a lot more scrutiny. We asked pointed questions about how they handle scope changes, how they estimate, how they communicate bad news. The answers were specific and consistent across everyone we spoke to on their team, which gave us confidence it wasn't a rehearsed pitch.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Very well. The discovery phase was more thorough than anything we'd been through with prior vendors. They pushed back on requirements that were vague or contradictory, suggested better alternatives where our own thinking was limited, and produced a spec our internal stakeholders agreed was the clearest version of the product they'd ever seen written down.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Proactive and well-calibrated. Technical detail for the engineering side, plain summaries for the steering group, and risk flags that came with a proposed fix attached rather than just a problem statement. The biweekly sprint reviews kept our stakeholders in the loop without requiring them to sit in on every working session.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
The project came in on schedule. Budget stayed within the agreed ceiling, including one scope addition we asked for ourselves, which was quoted fairly and handled without disturbing the rest of the timeline. Nothing about the invoice came as a surprise.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
We went live about three months ago. User adoption beat the target we'd set by roughly 20 percent in the first month, and support ticket volume has dropped noticeably since. Features we'd shelved because the old architecture made them too expensive to build are now back on the roadmap.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The team stayed the same the whole way through. The engineers in the discovery sessions were the same ones who built the system. That continuity matters more than people expect, and you really only notice it when it's missing. Every conversation picked up where the last one left off.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Yes — though I'll add that they're not the cheapest option out there and they're selective about what they take on. If price is your main filter, look elsewhere. If you need a partner you can trust with a serious CRM Development program in Energy & Utilities and expect them to actually deliver against the brief, this is the team.

Turned years of siloed spreadsheets into one dataset people actually trust

Aoibhinn Molloy / Director of Product | Apr 15, 2026

Going in, the integration work was what worried me most. Our systems landscape is messy, a couple of the third-party APIs we depend on are barely documented, and one of those vendors has a well-earned reputation for slow, inconsistent support. This team absorbed all of that. They documented what the upstream providers wouldn't, built in resilience wherever the upstream behavior was flaky, and shipped something that has worked exactly as specified since go-live. I genuinely couldn't have asked for more on that front.

Project summary

Our actuarial models had outgrown the reporting pipeline feeding them, and the resulting data lag was introducing real risk into pricing decisions the business wasn't comfortable carrying anymore.

  • Overall Rating 4.5
  • Quality 5.0
  • Schedule 4.0
  • Project Cost 4.0
  • Willing To Refer 5.0
Project Type:
Data & Analytics
Project Cost:
$50,000 to $149,999
Project Duration:
Jul 2025 - Jan 2026
Business Type:
Insurance
Location:
Galway, Ireland

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Barrow Digital Ltd is a Insurance business headquartered in Galway, Ireland. As Director of Product I'm responsible for the whole technology agenda — infrastructure, product, and how we pick vendors. Every decision we make on the technology side has to tie back to a clear business case before it gets approved.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Regulation in our Insurance segment shifted and the compliance deadline came from the regulator, not from us. The scale of the Data & Analytics changes required justified bringing in a specialist rather than pulling our internal team off the product roadmap to handle it.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The core of it was Data & Analytics, though their involvement grew to include technical consulting during discovery that meaningfully sharpened our own requirements. They also took full ownership of the third-party integration work, which had been a coordination headache on past projects, and just handled it themselves.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
We were coming off a failed engagement and went into vendor selection this time with a lot more scrutiny. We asked pointed questions about how they handle scope changes, how they estimate, how they communicate bad news. The answers were specific and consistent across everyone we spoke to on their team, which gave us confidence it wasn't a rehearsed pitch.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Better than we understood them ourselves, honestly. The workshops they ran surfaced assumptions we'd never questioned and exposed a few requirements that flatly contradicted each other. Sorting that out before development started saved us from what would have been serious rework later.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Proactive and well-calibrated. Technical detail for the engineering side, plain summaries for the steering group, and risk flags that came with a proposed fix attached rather than just a problem statement. The biweekly sprint reviews kept our stakeholders in the loop without requiring them to sit in on every working session.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Yes to both. I'd quietly built in some contingency given the complexity and the number of integrations involved, and none of it ended up being needed. Delivery landed on the agreed date and the final invoice was within a rounding error of the approved budget — rarer than most people in this industry would admit.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
Hard to isolate perfectly given everything else going on in the business, but the numbers we can attribute directly to the Data & Analytics work are solid: session duration up, conversion up, error rate down, and our NPS for that touchpoint has moved noticeably. Our account managers say it's coming up positively in client conversations now too.
What did you like most about working with this company?
What they did after launch. A lot of vendors treat go-live as the finish line. This team treated it as the start of a different phase — the hypercare period was substantial, the documentation held up in practice, and they checked back in at the thirty and ninety day marks to go over production metrics with us unprompted.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Absolutely, with one caveat worth mentioning: the value really starts in discovery, so clients who take that phase seriously will get the most out of it. We put real effort in upfront and it clearly paid off in what got delivered.

Positive ROAS by the end of the very first full campaign cycle

Griffin Ashcombe / Managing Director, Tech | Apr 14, 2026

This was our fourth agency in three years, and I say that with some embarrassment. Every previous engagement had looked promising on paper and fallen apart somewhere in delivery. What was different here was the sequencing: they spent real time understanding the actual problem before proposing anything, rather than pattern-matching to a solution they already knew how to sell. The build ran to schedule, our own engineers had genuinely positive things to say during handover, and four months into live operation we haven't had a single critical incident. We're already talking about the next phase with them.

Project summary

This project had a board-facing deadline tied to a wider strategic push. We needed a partner who'd treat that date like it was their own problem, not just ours.

  • Overall Rating 4.5
  • Quality 4.5
  • Schedule 4.0
  • Project Cost 5.0
  • Willing To Refer 5.0
Project Type:
Digital Marketing
Project Cost:
$50,000 to $149,999
Project Duration:
Sep 2025 - Mar 2026
Business Type:
Human Resources
Location:
San Francisco, USA

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Ridgeline Capital Partners is a Human Resources business headquartered in San Francisco, USA. As Managing Director, Tech I'm responsible for the whole technology agenda — infrastructure, product, and how we pick vendors. Every decision we make on the technology side has to tie back to a clear business case before it gets approved.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Regulation in our Human Resources segment shifted and the compliance deadline came from the regulator, not from us. The scale of the Digital Marketing changes required justified bringing in a specialist rather than pulling our internal team off the product roadmap to handle it.
What services did the company provide for your project?
Mainly Digital Marketing, with some adjacent architecture and QA work folded in. They owned the whole thing from requirements to go-live, including hooking it into four of our existing systems. Not needing a second vendor to cover that ground was genuinely useful, both cost-wise and logistically.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
We were coming off a failed engagement and went into vendor selection this time with a lot more scrutiny. We asked pointed questions about how they handle scope changes, how they estimate, how they communicate bad news. The answers were specific and consistent across everyone we spoke to on their team, which gave us confidence it wasn't a rehearsed pitch.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Thoroughly. The requirements document was detailed enough that our own QA team used it directly to build acceptance criteria. Every user story had a clear business reason attached, and nothing was left open to interpretation. That discipline early on paid off through the rest of development and testing.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Genuinely excellent, especially given the time difference between San Francisco, USA and the delivery team. Written updates were consistent and specific, anything needing a decision got same-day turnaround, and nothing slipped through the cracks across the whole engagement.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Both, yes. One sprint hit a one-week delay from a third-party API dependency outside anyone's control. The team flagged it three weeks ahead of time, laid out two options, and we picked an approach that clawed the schedule back within the same sprint. That's the kind of foresight that separates real project management from just reacting to problems.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
Hard to isolate perfectly given everything else going on in the business, but the numbers we can attribute directly to the Digital Marketing work are solid: session duration up, conversion up, error rate down, and our NPS for that touchpoint has moved noticeably. Our account managers say it's coming up positively in client conversations now too.
What did you like most about working with this company?
Their willingness to just be direct. If our requirements were unclear, they said so. If our priorities contradicted each other, they explained why. If an approach we'd assumed was right actually had real downsides, they told us before we'd committed to it. That kind of honesty is exactly what I look for in a long-term partner.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Yes — though I'll add that they're not the cheapest option out there and they're selective about what they take on. If price is your main filter, look elsewhere. If you need a partner you can trust with a serious Digital Marketing program in Human Resources and expect them to actually deliver against the brief, this is the team.

Designed around how our users actually behave, not the persona slide we'd been assuming

Hamza Farooqi / Co-Founder & CTO | Apr 11, 2026

This was our fourth agency in three years, and I say that with some embarrassment. Every previous engagement had looked promising on paper and fallen apart somewhere in delivery. What was different here was the sequencing: they spent real time understanding the actual problem before proposing anything, rather than pattern-matching to a solution they already knew how to sell. The build ran to schedule, our own engineers had genuinely positive things to say during handover, and four months into live operation we haven't had a single critical incident. We're already talking about the next phase with them.

Project summary

The shift to EVs created dealer network management needs our existing system was never designed for. A targeted rebuild was the path the leadership team had already agreed on.

  • Overall Rating 4.5
  • Quality 4.5
  • Schedule 4.0
  • Project Cost 4.5
  • Willing To Refer 5.0
Project Type:
UI/UX Design
Project Cost:
$500,000+
Project Duration:
May 2025 - Feb 2026
Business Type:
Automotive
Location:
Karachi, Pakistan

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Karakoram Software House has been operating in Automotive for a while now, headquartered in Karachi, Pakistan. As Co-Founder & CTO I sit across both strategic planning and day-to-day technology delivery. We hold our vendors to a high bar because our own clients hold us to one — it's only fair to expect the same discipline from partners.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
We had a clear product direction for our next stage of growth in Automotive, but not the internal engineering depth to actually execute it. The UI/UX Design piece specifically needed specialist skills we couldn't realistically hire for on the timeline our business plan demanded.
What services did the company provide for your project?
Mainly UI/UX Design, with some adjacent architecture and QA work folded in. They owned the whole thing from requirements to go-live, including hooking it into four of our existing systems. Not needing a second vendor to cover that ground was genuinely useful, both cost-wise and logistically.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
The questions they asked during the briefing stage told us most of what we needed to know. Vendors who ask sharp questions during sales tend to bring that same rigor into delivery, and that held up. The technical proposal had real substance, the team was senior from the start, and the pricing was straightforward.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Thoroughly. The requirements document was detailed enough that our own QA team used it directly to build acceptance criteria. Every user story had a clear business reason attached, and nothing was left open to interpretation. That discipline early on paid off through the rest of development and testing.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Genuinely excellent, especially given the time difference between Karachi, Pakistan and the delivery team. Written updates were consistent and specific, anything needing a decision got same-day turnaround, and nothing slipped through the cracks across the whole engagement.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Both, yes. One sprint hit a one-week delay from a third-party API dependency outside anyone's control. The team flagged it three weeks ahead of time, laid out two options, and we picked an approach that clawed the schedule back within the same sprint. That's the kind of foresight that separates real project management from just reacting to problems.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
We went live about three months ago. User adoption beat the target we'd set by roughly 20 percent in the first month, and support ticket volume has dropped noticeably since. Features we'd shelved because the old architecture made them too expensive to build are now back on the roadmap.
What did you like most about working with this company?
Their instinct for never losing the business goal in the middle of technical decisions. I've worked with technically strong teams before who lose that thread once things get complicated. This team kept every architectural call tied back to the outcome we'd actually agreed to, which made the harder trade-off conversations a lot easier.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Yes — though I'll add that they're not the cheapest option out there and they're selective about what they take on. If price is your main filter, look elsewhere. If you need a partner you can trust with a serious UI/UX Design program in Automotive and expect them to actually deliver against the brief, this is the team.

They built what we actually needed, which wasn't quite what we originally asked for

Percy Wren / Director of eCommerce | Apr 01, 2026

Going in, the integration work was what worried me most. Our systems landscape is messy, a couple of the third-party APIs we depend on are barely documented, and one of those vendors has a well-earned reputation for slow, inconsistent support. This team absorbed all of that. They documented what the upstream providers wouldn't, built in resilience wherever the upstream behavior was flaky, and shipped something that has worked exactly as specified since go-live. I genuinely couldn't have asked for more on that front.

Project summary

Our internal engineering capacity was fully committed to keeping existing systems running, with no room for a build of this size. An outside partner with the right depth was really our only option.

  • Overall Rating 4.0
  • Quality 4.0
  • Schedule 4.0
  • Project Cost 4.0
  • Willing To Refer 5.0
Project Type:
Software Development
Project Cost:
$150,000 to $499,999
Project Duration:
Aug 2025 - Mar 2026
Business Type:
Agriculture
Location:
Birmingham, UK

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
I run technology for Wren & Holt Retail PLC, a growth-stage Agriculture company based in Birmingham, UK. My role as Director of eCommerce covers product engineering, platform operations, and our vendor relationships. We'd hit a point where our internal capacity just couldn't keep pace with what the roadmap demanded.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
A competitor move forced our hand and compressed a roadmap item we'd planned for the following year. The Software Development investment we'd scheduled twelve months out suddenly needed to happen in six, and building it internally in that window wasn't realistic.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The scope ran the full Software Development lifecycle — discovery, requirements, architecture, development across roughly a dozen sprints, integration testing, performance validation, deployment, and a four-week hypercare window afterward. They also handed over full documentation and ran a knowledge transfer session for our internal team.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
We were coming off a failed engagement and went into vendor selection this time with a lot more scrutiny. We asked pointed questions about how they handle scope changes, how they estimate, how they communicate bad news. The answers were specific and consistent across everyone we spoke to on their team, which gave us confidence it wasn't a rehearsed pitch.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Better than we understood them ourselves, honestly. The workshops they ran surfaced assumptions we'd never questioned and exposed a few requirements that flatly contradicted each other. Sorting that out before development started saved us from what would have been serious rework later.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Genuinely excellent, especially given the time difference between Birmingham, UK and the delivery team. Written updates were consistent and specific, anything needing a decision got same-day turnaround, and nothing slipped through the cracks across the whole engagement.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Yes to both. I'd quietly built in some contingency given the complexity and the number of integrations involved, and none of it ended up being needed. Delivery landed on the agreed date and the final invoice was within a rounding error of the approved budget — rarer than most people in this industry would admit.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
We went live about three months ago. User adoption beat the target we'd set by roughly 20 percent in the first month, and support ticket volume has dropped noticeably since. Features we'd shelved because the old architecture made them too expensive to build are now back on the roadmap.
What did you like most about working with this company?
Their willingness to just be direct. If our requirements were unclear, they said so. If our priorities contradicted each other, they explained why. If an approach we'd assumed was right actually had real downsides, they told us before we'd committed to it. That kind of honesty is exactly what I look for in a long-term partner.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Without reservation. We're already in early conversations about a second engagement, and I expect this to turn into a multi-year relationship. Anyone in Agriculture looking for real Software Development depth paired with actual delivery discipline should have this team near the top of their list.

The return on this investment outpaced the business case we originally approved

Henrik Schuster / VP of Technology | Feb 02, 2026

We had proposals in hand ranging from roughly half to well over double what we eventually paid this team. What set their proposal apart wasn't the price — it was that the number matched what they actually delivered, almost line for line. I've been burned before by proposals that were really just opening offers in a negotiation that continues throughout the project. That wasn't the case here, and I don't say that lightly.

Project summary

New open banking rules meant our API layer needed rebuilding from scratch, with compliance designed in from the start rather than patched on afterward.

  • Overall Rating 4.0
  • Quality 4.0
  • Schedule 3.5
  • Project Cost 4.5
  • Willing To Refer 5.0
Project Type:
Embedded Systems Development
Project Cost:
Less than $10,000
Project Duration:
Jul 2025 - Jan 2026
Business Type:
Financial Services
Location:
Bremen, Germany

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
As VP of Technology at NordWelle Logistik GmbH I oversee technology spend and delivery across our Financial Services operations out of Bremen, Germany. We're a commercially minded business, so every technology decision gets judged on what it actually contributes to the bottom line, not on how elegant it looks on paper.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Our Embedded Systems Development capability had become the thing slowing everything else down. New feature requests, client asks, internal initiatives — all of it kept queuing up behind a platform that had been stretched way past what it was originally built for. We needed a proper rebuild, not another patch.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The scope ran the full Embedded Systems Development lifecycle — discovery, requirements, architecture, development across roughly a dozen sprints, integration testing, performance validation, deployment, and a four-week hypercare window afterward. They also handed over full documentation and ran a knowledge transfer session for our internal team.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
A peer in the Financial Services space had used them for something similar in Embedded Systems Development and recommended them without hesitation. Our own due diligence backed that up. Domain knowledge, Embedded Systems Development depth, and a track record of actually delivering — that combination made the decision easy.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Really well, partly because they already had Financial Services experience that cut down on the amount of context we had to provide. They knew the terminology, asked the right questions, and translated our business requirements into technical specs accurately enough that development barely needed any clarification cycles.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Professional throughout. The project manager always had a clear view of the critical path and flagged changes to it honestly, without spin. The one significant scope change we made mid-project went through a clean process — fairly priced, clearly documented, and absorbed without knocking the rest of the timeline off course.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
On time and inside the approved budget. Their estimating was notably accurate — they'd broken the work down in enough detail during discovery that the forecast held up the whole way through, instead of drifting with every small change. We had exactly one change request, and it was for scope we added ourselves.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
The ROI model we took to the board was deliberately conservative. Current performance against that model puts us on track to hit payback well ahead of the eighteen-month target we set. The operational efficiency gains in particular have outpaced the model, partly because the new platform's data quality supports decisions the old system simply couldn't.
What did you like most about working with this company?
What they did after launch. A lot of vendors treat go-live as the finish line. This team treated it as the start of a different phase — the hypercare period was substantial, the documentation held up in practice, and they checked back in at the thirty and ninety day marks to go over production metrics with us unprompted.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Yes, no hesitation. I've already referred them twice within my own Financial Services network, both times to people facing Embedded Systems Development problems similar to ours. I made those referrals confidently because I know the experience I had was repeatable, not a one-off stroke of luck on our project.
FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Got questions about our specialized technology solutions? We have the answers to help you make informed decisions.

Flying hippo typically covers the standard range of software development work — mobile apps, web platforms, custom internal tools, UI/UX design, cloud infrastructure, AI integrations, and larger enterprise builds. Its core focus areas include Branding, Mobile App Development, UI-UX Design, Web Design and Web Development.

What Flying hippo charges comes down to a handful of variables — how complex the project is, the number of development hours involved, the tech stack required, team size, and which engagement model you pick. Based on available data, Flying hippo's typical hourly rate is around $100 - $149.

Flying hippo has delivered projects across a range of different industries, including Information Technology, Financial Services, Events & Event Management, Retail & E-commerce, Automotive and Manufacturing.

The exact stack shifts by project, but Flying hippo commonly works across things like React, Angular, Vue.js, Node.js, Python, .NET, Java, PHP, Flutter, React Native, native iOS and Android, and cloud platforms like AWS and Azure. For context, it has experience across industries such as Information Technology, Financial Services, Events & Event Management, Retail & E-commerce, Automotive and Manufacturing, and its listed capabilities span Branding, Mobile App Development, UI-UX Design, Web Design and Web Development.

Like most established software teams, Flying hippo typically sticks around post-launch for ongoing maintenance — bug fixes, performance tuning, security patching, new feature work, and general technical support. For context, it has experience across industries such as Information Technology, Financial Services, Events & Event Management, Retail & E-commerce, Automotive and Manufacturing, and its listed capabilities span Branding, Mobile App Development, UI-UX Design, Web Design and Web Development.

Most businesses reach Flying hippo through its website, a direct email, or a contact form — any of which works for discussing what you need, booking an initial conversation, or asking for a rough estimate. For context, its listed capabilities span Branding, Mobile App Development, UI-UX Design, Web Design and Web Development, and it has been operating since 2003.

Usually, yes — a dedicated developer arrangement is a common option with firms like Flying hippo, where you get engineers working exclusively on your project as an extension of your in-house team rather than as a separate outsourced unit. For context, it has experience across industries such as Information Technology, Financial Services, Events & Event Management, Retail & E-commerce, Automotive and Manufacturing, and its typical hourly rate is around $100 - $149.

Plenty of modern software teams, Flying hippo included, now build real AI and machine learning features — chatbots, predictive models, computer vision, and automation that goes beyond simple rule-based scripts. For context, its listed capabilities span Branding, Mobile App Development, UI-UX Design, Web Design and Web Development, and it reports a team size of 10 - 49 professionals.

Most professional shops, including Flying hippo, expect to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement before getting into specifics — it's a fairly standard ask and a reasonable one to make before sharing anything sensitive. For context, its listed capabilities span Branding, Mobile App Development, UI-UX Design, Web Design and Web Development, and its typical hourly rate is around $100 - $149.

It's a common line of work for a company like Flying hippo — multi-tenant architecture, subscription billing hooked up properly, and cloud-native deployment built for a product meant to scale as a service rather than a one-off build. For context, it has experience across industries such as Information Technology, Financial Services, Events & Event Management, Retail & E-commerce, Automotive and Manufacturing, and its typical hourly rate is around $100 - $149.
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