We are thirty-one
people, three timezones,
one stubborn studio.
Graffitecs is a deliberately small software house. We don't scale through bodies — we scale through judgement, taste, and a stack of opinions accumulated over a hundred shipped products. We work with founders and product teams who'd rather have one really good build than three mediocre ones.
A studio, not
an agency.
Started in a coworking room in Karama. Still allergic to slide decks that don't ship anything.
Graffitecs was founded in 2017 by three engineers and a designer who'd burned out on agency life — projects shaped to fit timesheets, decks that died in deal rooms, "innovation" that was 70% rebrand. We left to build software, full stop.
The first year was four people, one client, and a rule we still keep: every engagement ships a working product, not a recommendation. The second year we said no to twelve briefs and yes to four. We've grown — slowly, on purpose — to thirty-one, and we still say no a lot.
The name? "Graffitecs" started as a joke about marking up codebases the way good graffiti marks up cities — with intent, craft, and a little defiance. The joke stuck.
Six rules we
actually live by.
Ship over slides.
Working software, end of week one. Strategy is what's left over after you remove the hand-waving.
Small senior teams.
No staffing pyramid. The person you meet in the pitch is the person on the keyboard.
Own the boring bits.
CI, observability, on-call rotations, IAM. Boring is where products survive.
Say no, often.
We turn down ~70% of inbound. Match matters more than calendar fit.
Write things down.
Every decision lives in a doc with a date and a name. Future-you will thank us.
Open by default.
Where it doesn't compromise client work, we publish. Tools, posts, the lot.
Want to build
something with us?
We pick four to six projects a year. We'll know within a 30-minute call whether we're a fit.