The studio
The studio.
A studio for the work that doesn’t fit a template.
Core Shift Studios builds bespoke software for charities, social enterprises, and umbrella bodies. We take on a small number of commissions each year, each one built from scratch around the actual workflow of the team that will use it.
Why bespoke
The third sector has been sold one answer to its software problem: SaaS. Salesforce. HubSpot. Dynamics. Sector-specific platforms built on top of them. Charity tech consultants recommend them. Funders sometimes specify them. Boards approve them because they look like the safe choice.
The maths rarely holds. Enterprise platforms list at £45 to £200+ per user per month, before integration, implementation, and platform fees. A 30-person organisation can be looking at £30k–£60k a year, every year, forever — scaling the wrong way as the mission grows. Mid-tier sector platforms still run £30–£80 per seat per month with the same structural problem.
So most organisations don’t fully commit. They license a platform for a few users and run the rest of the work on spreadsheets that only one person understands, SharePoint folders organised by whoever set them up in 2019, paper files, and institutional knowledge that walks out the door when a colleague leaves. The real cost isn’t the licence. It’s the hours lost to manual reconciliation, the funder reports cobbled together from four sources, the compliance risk no one has time to fix.
Bespoke is assumed to be worse. The logic is intuitive: if SaaS is already too expensive, custom-built software must be out of the question. Traditional agency pricing reinforced that — £60k–£80k for smaller systems, £200k or more for mid-range builds. Bespoke was for organisations that could afford it. The third sector mostly couldn’t.
That assumption is now wrong. AI-assisted development has changed the economics. Builds that used to require six-figure budgets and twelve-month timelines can be delivered for a fraction of that — properly, not cheaply. The system is yours. It’s built around how your organisation actually works. There are no per-seat fees, no annual licence renewals, no platforms holding your data hostage when you decide to leave.
For most third-sector organisations, the question isn’t whether bespoke is better than SaaS. It’s whether anyone has shown them that bespoke is finally an option.
What we believe
Software should serve the mission, not survive it.
Most third-sector organisations build their work around their software. We build the other way round.
Sector knowledge isn’t optional.
We work only with organisations whose context we understand. We’ve sat in third-sector SMTs, written board papers, navigated funder reporting, lived inside the operational realities of charity work. That context shows up in every decision the software makes.
Funding shouldn’t be the barrier.
We help organisations build the case for digital infrastructure inside funding applications — the language funders respond to, the outcomes that justify investment, the cost framing that makes commissioning bespoke software a defensible line in a grant bid. The build is one conversation. Paying for it is a separate one we can support.
Long relationships, not transactions.
Software is alive. We stay involved after launch on terms that suit the organisation’s reality — light-touch retainer, defined enhancement budgets, or call-when-you-need-us. We don’t ship and vanish.
Belfast, Northern Ireland · Working with the UK and Ireland