Preston’s tech scene is growing fast, from the digital businesses clustered around the city centre to the fintech and logistics firms serving the wider Lancashire supply chain. If you’re a Preston-based founder or operations lead planning a SaaS product, the stack matters as much as the strategy. React, Supabase and Netlify have become the go-to combination for UK startups that need to ship quickly without locking themselves into brittle, proprietary infrastructure — and By Design UK builds exactly this kind of platform, fixed price, with full source code ownership from day one.
We’re not a freelancer working evenings between other clients, and we’re not a traditional agency with a six-week discovery phase and a project manager between you and the developers. We sit deliberately in between: a small, senior UK team using AI-accelerated development practices to build production-grade software at a fraction of the traditional timeline and cost, while still giving you a fixed price and a contract you can actually understand.
React gives you a fast, maintainable front end that any competent UK developer can pick up later — no vendor lock-in. Supabase provides a Postgres-backed backend with authentication, storage and real-time data out of the box, which means less custom infrastructure to maintain and lower long-term support costs. Netlify handles deployment and scaling without the DevOps overhead of managing your own servers. Together, this stack lets a Preston startup launch an MVP in weeks rather than months, and scale it without a rebuild when the business grows.
This isn’t theoretical for us. We built and continue to run Tackly.co.uk, a live multi-toolkit SaaS platform, on this exact type of modern stack. It’s daily proof that we don’t just design software, we operate it — which means we understand uptime, billing edge cases, user support and the real-world problems that only surface once paying customers are using your product.
SaaS builds through By Design UK typically range from £18,000 to £650,000+, depending on scope, integrations and complexity. A lean MVP for a Preston founder validating a new idea — think a single core feature, Supabase auth and a Stripe billing hookup — sits toward the lower end of that range. A multi-tenant platform with complex permissions, third-party integrations and custom reporting sits toward the top. Every project is scoped and quoted as a fixed price before work begins, so you know the total cost upfront, not after change requests start arriving. You can see full detail on our SaaS development page, or get in touch via our contact page for a scoped estimate.
If your Preston business is running (or considering) an ecommerce store alongside your software product, we also build and customise Shopify storefronts, from £499 for smaller builds up to £18,999 for fully bespoke, high-conversion setups — details on the Shopify services page.
Most Preston founders shopping around for development help hit the same two problems. Freelancers are often affordable and fast to start, but reliability is a gamble — projects stall when they take on other work, code quality varies, and you’re rarely guaranteed clean ownership of what’s built. Traditional agencies solve the reliability problem but introduce new ones: opaque day-rate pricing that balloons past the original quote, slow decision-making through multiple layers of account management, and timelines measured in quarters rather than weeks. By Design UK was built specifically to close that gap — senior UK-based development, fixed pricing agreed upfront, AI-accelerated build processes that cut delivery time significantly, and a contract that hands you full source code ownership, not a licence to use someone else’s platform.
Launching is only the start. Supabase, Netlify and your dependencies all need monitoring, patching and occasional feature work as your Preston customer base grows. Our support plans start from £797/month for SaaS platforms and £299/month for Shopify stores, covering monitoring, security updates, bug fixes and a bank of development hours you can draw on as needed. Full details are on our support plans page. You can also learn more about how we work and who’s behind the studio on our about page.
Yes. We work fully remotely with clients across the UK, including Preston and the wider North West. All meetings, planning and delivery happen online or by phone, so location is never a barrier.
Yes. Every project we deliver comes with full source code ownership transferred to you on completion. You are never locked into our team, hosting, or a proprietary platform.
We use AI tooling to speed up routine coding, testing and documentation work, which reduces the hours required for a given scope. That efficiency is passed on through fixed prices that are typically lower than traditional agency day-rate quotes for equivalent work.
Yes. Tackly.co.uk is a live, multi-toolkit SaaS platform we built and continue to operate ourselves, using the same type of modern stack we recommend to clients. It’s a working example of our technical capability, not just a case study.
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