GoldenEye

The build covers the three portals, the cluster pricing engine, and the Firebase and Google Cloud foundation underneath. Branding and theme were agreed in Figma before flows were detailed, so the design system was settled rather than negotiated feature by feature.

KYC and payment processing are delegated to third parties rather than built in house, which is both faster and the right call for the compliance surface.

• Resident mobile app: signup and onboarding, email and account verification, the cluster the home belongs to, the current provider’s expected arrival time, visit history, and the option to add family members to a household.
• Web billing portal: responsive, holding login, signup and subscription activation. A subscription is activated before identity verification rather than after, so a resident is paying before the KYC step and not abandoned in it.
• Security company portal: a dashboard with company details, driver management, cluster assignment, duty logging and SOS alerts, laid out with a sidebar so a dispatcher can move between clusters without losing the page.

Branding was settled first, a dark navy ground with the client’s gold on solid buttons rather than gradients, and defined as colour variables in Figma so a change in one place propagates everywhere. Every screen was finalised in Figma and walked through in a designer-narrated video before development began, because the design was going to be converted directly into code and a flow that changes mid-build is paid for twice.

The client team works nine hours behind our engineers, so day-to-day feedback ran through Discord with calls reserved for full flow walkthroughs. The Firebase project was created on the pay-as-you-go tier for development, with the option to move to fixed monthly pricing once usage settled.

The first proposal came in above the budget they had in mind. The reflex is to compress estimates and hope. We recommended cutting a feature instead: no payments or subscriptions inside the mobile app at all.

Apple and Google take a percentage of every in-app transaction, and satisfying each store's rules is engineering work on top of the fee. Moving subscription management to the GoldenEye web app removed the build cost, removed the commission permanently, and took app review off the critical path for every release after. The app became read-only.