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, an entire 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. That's often 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 monthThese are the prices where things typically land, not a menu. Every project gets a fixed number before any work starts, so you're never watching a meter run.
Below the surface
The things every application needs, built enough times to get them right.
👋 Hey, I'm Matthew, and I've been doing this for over a decade. 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's glamorous, and all of it's 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 one-in-a-million bug happens 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.
Day to day I work in TypeScript - React in front, Node behind it. For data, I use whatever the project already has - I've shipped production work on MongoDB and Postgres, and which one you're on matters far less than what's been built on top of it. I host smaller sites (like this one!) on Cloudflare. Picking up something new is rarely the slow part of a project, so if your team is on something else, I'm happy to dive in.
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