We build practical, no-nonsense tools for real businesses — manufacturing, messaging, marketing and more. Web platforms and native Mac apps, made in the UK.
Browser-based tools your whole team can use — no installs, no fuss.
Manufacturing resource planning for small manufacturers. Stock control, bills of materials, purchase orders, goods receiving and works orders — built for shop-floor reality, not enterprise bloat.
A shared WhatsApp inbox for teams. Let your whole team answer one WhatsApp number — with assignment, full history, templates, campaigns and automations.
SEO and GEO (generative engine optimisation) monitoring. Site audits, keyword tracking, and visibility monitoring in AI answers — because search doesn't just mean Google any more.
Plan, schedule and publish social content across LinkedIn and Meta from one calm place. Write once, post everywhere, on schedule.
Business planning that does the arithmetic. Say what the business is aiming for and it back-solves the volumes required, tests them against real capacity, models the three statements to prove the balance sheet, and produces a plan a bank or an investor can act on.
Cloud telephony management — companies, users, extensions and a drag-and-drop call-flow designer that publishes a clean, vendor-neutral configuration.
For the phone in your pocket — iPhone and Android.
Count down to anything in years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds. Colourful blocks with your own photo and icon, snoozable reminders, and countdowns shared with the family. No subscription, no adverts, no trackers.
Fast, native Swift apps that feel right at home on your Mac — and on the iPad where it makes sense.
For the book you've been meaning to write for years. Capture fragments of prose as they come — typed or dictated, with the original audio kept beside the words — then pin them to a timeline that accepts “after the move” and “sometime that summer” instead of demanding a date you don't have. An interviewer reads what you've written, spots the gaps, and asks about them. It never writes a line: every word of the book stays yours.
A modern, native Mac alternative to Microsoft Access. Tables, queries and drill-downs — plus an app mode so your end users get a clean, focused tool.
A menu-bar developer toolbox: code snippets organised by project, an API client, a Keychain-backed key vault, regex tester, QR codes, colour tools and converters.
A workbench for ESP32 boards running MicroPython. Connect over USB, flash the firmware, push code straight to the board and watch live sensor data come back — with a portal for keeping an eye on the boards once they're out in the field.
A Dreamweaver-style environment for hand-written HTML, CSS and JavaScript: your site on the left, the editor in the middle, a live preview on the right that updates as you type.
Presentations that zoom rather than advance. Nested frames you fly between, micro-frames for the detail, PowerPoint export for when the client insists — and AI that drafts the stack to get you started.
Time tracking for freelancers and agencies. Timers, reports and invoices — with optional work screenshots when your clients want the receipts.
Work under way for clients right now. We don't name names until they tell us we can.
Scheduling a season of events: what's booked, who is going, what has to be loaded into the van, and who still owes a deposit — in one place instead of six spreadsheets.
Following physical items through a workflow — booked in, inspected, certified, and back out to the customer with the paperwork that proves what happened to them.
Manufacturing resource planning shaped around how a particular shop floor actually works, rather than how the software wishes it did.
Not business software. Built because they were interesting.
Three daily puzzles at scaddle.co.uk — Scaddle Word, Stackle and Pyramid Blocks. Original games, not clones of anyone else's.
An interactive 3D viewer for karate kata. Orbit to any angle, scrub to any point in the sequence, and slow it right down to see what the hips are doing.
A Mac app for the daily Spelling Bee puzzle, with a proper word list behind it and a switch for whether you want the obscure ones.
Trip planning, safety checks and getting the van ready for winter storage — for people who own one rather than for the trade.
Be Useful is an independent UK software studio. We build the tools we wish existed: focused, fast and priced for real businesses. Everything here is designed, built and supported by people who answer their own email.
Want a demo, pricing, or something built for your business? Get in touch below — or ask the chat assistant.
Questions, demos, pricing or support — messages go straight to Tony.