A software company that runs what it builds.
Zatto is small on purpose. You talk to the person who writes the code, and the code has to survive contact with production because we are the ones on the other end of it.
How this happened
It started the way most of these start: tools built to run our own work, because nothing on the market fitted the shape of it. A planning system. A workspace for issues, documents and specifications. A quality-management product for the kind of regulated manufacturing where a nonconformity has to be traceable years later.
Then TopSky — a flight operations platform for a virtual airline that had outgrown the legacy software holding its roster, schedule and flight records together. That one went public, and it is the one running in production with people depending on it today.
Client work funds the product side. That is the deliberate order, and it is the order almost every product company in this category actually went through, whatever their About page says now. We are honest about which stage we are at: the products are real and running, and they are not yet paying all the bills.
How we work
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Fixed scope, written down
A specification before a price, and a price that does not move once we start. If the scope changes, that is a new number and a new decision — yours.
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Running software, weekly
A URL you can open from the second week, and one written update a week. Progress you can click beats progress you have to take on trust.
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We say no
If the thing you are asking for should not be built, or should be bought instead of built, we will say so before you spend money on it.
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Boring technology
Well-worn stacks with large hiring pools, not whatever launched last month. The person who maintains this in three years may not be us.
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Stated boundaries on models
Where a language model does part of the work, we write down what it may decide, what it may never decide, and what a person has to confirm.
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It has to keep running
Deployment, backups, monitoring and alerts are part of the build, not an upsell after launch.