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Stow Quill

UK software engineering consultancy

Engineering software that solves real business problems.

Stow Quill Ltd designs, builds and supports modern cloud software, AI-powered applications and automation platforms for businesses across the UK.

Software EngineeringAIAutomationSaaS

  • Software Engineering

    Bespoke applications, built and maintained in-house.

  • AI Integration

    Modern models applied where they earn their place.

  • Cloud Infrastructure

    Scalable hosting on AWS, Firebase and Cloudflare.

  • Automation

    Repetitive work replaced with reliable workflows.

  • Long-Term Support

    Maintenance and development well past launch day.

Services

Consultancy and delivery

Engaged for a single review or for the full build and everything after it.

  • Custom Software Development

    Business software built specifically around how your organisation actually works, rather than bent to fit an off-the-shelf product.

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    We start from your existing process — the spreadsheets, the workarounds, the things people do twice — and design software that removes the friction rather than formalising it. Projects are delivered in working increments so you can use and judge the software long before it is finished.

    • Web applications and internal tools
    • Multi-tenant SaaS platforms
    • Role-based access and audit trails
    • Documentation and handover
  • AI Integration

    Bring OpenAI, Claude and Gemini into the systems you already run, applied to problems where they genuinely help.

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    We treat AI as one component in a wider system, not the point of it. That means grounding models in your own data, validating what comes back before it reaches a user or a database, and designing a sensible fallback for when a model is slow, unavailable or wrong.

    • Document extraction and classification
    • Retrieval over your own content
    • Drafting and summarisation in-workflow
    • Structured, schema-validated model output
  • Business Automation

    Reduce repetitive manual work with scheduled jobs, event-driven workflows and integrations between the tools you already pay for.

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    Most organisations lose hours to re-keying data between systems that were never introduced to each other. We map those handoffs and replace them with reliable automation that logs what it did, retries sensibly, and tells someone when it cannot proceed.

    • Scheduled and event-triggered jobs
    • System-to-system data synchronisation
    • Automated reporting and notifications
    • Approval and exception handling
  • Cloud Infrastructure

    Scalable, observable hosting on AWS, Firebase and Cloudflare, set up so it stays affordable as you grow.

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    Infrastructure defined in code, environments that mirror each other, and deployments that can be rolled back. We size for what you actually need now while leaving clear headroom, and put monitoring in place so problems surface before your customers report them.

    • Environment and deployment pipelines
    • Monitoring, logging and alerting
    • Backup and recovery procedures
    • Cost review and right-sizing
  • Technical Consultancy

    Architecture reviews, delivery planning and technical leadership for teams without an in-house engineering lead.

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    Sometimes the useful thing is not more code but a clear-eyed read on what you have. We review the codebase and infrastructure, set out the risks in plain language with the cost of leaving each one alone, and help you sequence the work that follows.

    • Architecture and codebase review
    • Technical due diligence
    • Delivery roadmaps and estimates
    • Supplier and platform selection
  • API Development

    Secure, documented REST APIs and integrations with payment, messaging and third-party platforms.

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    APIs designed to be used by someone who has never met you: predictable resources, honest error responses, versioning that does not break existing consumers, and authentication that suits the caller — whether that is a partner system, a mobile client or your own front end.

    • REST APIs with OpenAPI documentation
    • Webhook delivery and receipt
    • Payment and identity provider integration
    • Rate limiting and API key management
  • Legacy System Modernisation

    Move ageing systems onto supported foundations incrementally, without stopping the business while it happens.

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    Rewrites that pause the business rarely finish. We prefer to put a boundary around the old system, move functionality across a piece at a time, and keep both running until the last consumer has moved — so there is never a single date on which everything has to work.

    • Migration planning and risk assessment
    • Incremental replacement, module by module
    • Data migration and reconciliation
    • Parallel running and cutover
Products

Products built by Stow Quill

Alongside consultancy, we design and operate our own software platforms.

  • House Desk

    Hospitality

    A staff management and rota platform for multi-site hospitality. Scheduling, shift cover, training records and standard operating procedures in one place, so managers stop running the rota out of a group chat.

    • Rotas & shift cover
    • Training records
    • Multi-site
  • Sort-It

    Safeguarding

    A student wellbeing and safeguarding platform for schools. Pupils can raise a concern or ask for support discreetly, and staff get a clear, auditable record of what was reported and what happened next.

    • Confidential reporting
    • Staff alerts
    • Offline-first
  • Pick.gallery

    Photography

    Professional online galleries for photographers. Clients review, favourite and select images from a gallery carrying the photographer's own branding, with ordering and delivery handled in the same place.

    • Client selection
    • Own branding
    • Print ordering
  • Forage

    Food

    Smart kitchen inventory and meal planning for households. Track what is in the cupboard and when it expires, plan meals around what you already have, and generate a shopping list from what is genuinely missing.

    • Inventory & expiry
    • Meal planning
    • Shopping lists
  • Bopple

    Print

    A manufacturing, fulfilment and print automation platform. Orders arrive, artwork is prepared and validated, and production and dispatch are tracked through to delivery without the job bag ever being printed out.

    • Order to dispatch
    • Artwork handling
    • Production tracking
Ecosystem

A connected software ecosystem.

Our products are separate platforms serving separate industries, but they are engineered on shared foundations.

Each product is built on the same core engineering: common authentication and permissions patterns, a shared approach to design tokens and components, the same cloud infrastructure, and one continuous integration pipeline.

That shared base means an improvement made for one platform — a faster data layer, a better accessibility pattern, a hardened security control — can be carried across to the others. Where it genuinely helps a customer, products are engineered to work together; where it does not, they stay independent.

Stow Quill

Shared engineering

  1. House Desk

    Hospitality

  2. Sort-It

    Safeguarding

  3. Pick.gallery

    Photography

  4. Forage

    Food

  5. Bopple

    Print

Process

How we work

Five stages, each with something you can see and use at the end of it.

  1. Step 1

    Discover

    We learn how the work is done today — the systems, the people and the exceptions — and agree what success actually looks like before anything is built.

  2. Step 2

    Design

    Architecture, data model and interface designed together, so the technical shape and the user experience are decided at the same time rather than one inheriting the other.

  3. Step 3

    Develop

    Built in working increments you can use and react to. Tested as it goes, reviewed as it goes, with progress visible rather than reported.

  4. Step 4

    Deploy

    Released through a repeatable pipeline into monitored infrastructure, with data migrated, rollback available and the team shown how it all works.

  5. Step 5

    Support

    Ongoing maintenance, dependency and security updates, and continued development as the business changes. Software is not finished when it ships.

Technologies

The stack we build on

Chosen for maintainability and a long support horizon, not novelty.

Frontend

  • React
  • Next.js
  • TypeScript

Backend

  • Node.js
  • REST APIs

Cloud & Infrastructure

  • Firebase
  • AWS
  • Cloudflare
  • Docker

AI

  • OpenAI

Data

  • SQL

Tooling

  • GitHub
Why Stow Quill

What you get working with us

  • UK Based

    A registered UK company working in your timezone, reachable directly by the people writing the code.

  • Modern Cloud Architecture

    Serverless and container workloads on AWS, Firebase and Cloudflare, defined in code and deployed repeatably.

  • AI Specialists

    Practical experience integrating current models into production systems, with validation and fallbacks around them.

  • Built for Scale

    Multi-tenant foundations, sensible data modelling and caching, so growth is a configuration change rather than a rewrite.

  • Security Focused

    Least-privilege access, secrets held in managed vaults, dependencies patched, and data handled under UK GDPR.

  • Ongoing Support

    Maintenance, monitoring and continued development, rather than a handover and a closed door.

  • Rapid Development

    Working increments early and often, so you can steer the build from real software rather than a specification.

  • Real Products, Real Experience

    We run our own SaaS platforms in production, so the trade-offs we recommend are ones we live with ourselves.

About

About Stow Quill

Stow Quill Ltd is a UK software engineering company specialising in bespoke software, AI integration and cloud platforms. Alongside client consultancy, we develop and maintain our own portfolio of SaaS products across multiple industries.

Running our own platforms in production changes how we build for clients. We carry the consequences of our own architectural decisions — the migrations, the on-call, the cost of a shortcut taken two years ago — so the advice we give is shaped by having lived with it rather than by having read about it.

Every project is built with long-term maintainability, scalability and reliability in mind. That means code someone else can pick up, infrastructure that can be rebuilt from source, and documentation that survives the handover.

Registered in
England & Wales
Company number
15671718
Based in
Harlow, Essex
Contact

Start a conversation

Tell us what you are trying to solve and we will come back to you with an honest view of whether we can help.

Whether you have a defined project or an early idea, we are happy to talk it through. No obligation and no sales sequence — just a straight answer on fit, approach and rough scale.

Registered office
Stow Quill Ltd
Harlow, Essex
United Kingdom
Company number 15671718

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