Software consulting · New Hampshire seacoast
Big Water is a one-person software practice. Sites and web applications, start to finish — or a pair of hands on a team that's short one. My background is in the parts that have to work: the data underneath, the state that has to stay correct, the code someone will still be maintaining in five years.
What I take on
A marketing site, a booking system, an internal tool, a whole product. I handle the whole arc — figuring out what it needs to do, building it, getting it live, and making sure you can run it afterward. One person, so there's nothing lost in a handoff.
Sites from $2,500 · Applications from $15,000 Businesses · founders · teams without engineersYou're short a developer and the deadline didn't move. I join the way a teammate would — your stack, your conventions, your review process — and take whichever piece is in the way. Often that's the complicated one nobody wants to own.
$5,500 / week · $160 / hour Agencies · product teamsAn application that half-works, built by someone who's gone. I find out what's actually wrong, tell you plainly whether it's worth repairing or replacing, and price whichever one you pick before I start. No surprises halfway through.
Fixed price, quoted before I start Anyone stuck with inherited codeHosting, updates, backups, and the small changes that come up — handled monthly so you don't have to think about it. The person who answers is the person who built it, not a support queue in another time zone.
$150–$400 / month Ongoing, by the monthThose are where things typically land, not a menu. Every project gets a fixed number before any work starts, so you are never watching a meter run.
Below the surface
The things every application needs, built enough times to get them right.
I'm Matthew. Over a decade of this. Roles and permissions. Commenting and collaboration. Search. Payments. Moving a live database to a new shape without losing anything or taking the product down. None of it is glamorous, and all of it is where projects actually go wrong — usually because someone was solving it for the first time on your budget.
The hardest year of that was spent on real-time collaborative editing: the problem of letting many people work on the same thing at once without anyone's changes disappearing — at a volume where a bug that happens one time in a million happens every week. Most projects never go anywhere near that, but it's why I'm useful when something breaks in a way that won't reproduce, or goes wrong only under real traffic.
Previously at Turo, Aura Frames, Little Cinema Digital, and SourceClear.
Currently. I've shipped production work on both document and relational databases, and picking up a new framework has never been the slow part of a project — if your team is on something else, that's fine.
Get in touch
Tell me roughly what's going on. If it's not something I can help with, I'll say so and point you somewhere better.
Usually replies within one business day.
Prefer email? matthew@bigwaterhq.com