blog/custom-software.html

WHEN OFF-THE-SHELF STOPS WORKING

Bespoke web development, build vs buy, microservices, real-time apps, and what custom actually costs in 2026. For founders past the no-code phase.

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A traditional balance scale on a clean wooden surface, ingots on one side and a small geometric productivity icon on the other

What Claude Code actually costs at agency scale in 2026

Claude Code costs Seahawk roughly 1,200 to 2,400 USD per engineer per month at production usage in 2026. The honest breakdown of what we spend, what drives variance, and the math.

5 May 2026

Three stacked architectural drawing sheets with subtle differences, suggesting layered standards across client projects

CLAUDE.md for agencies: scaling AI coding standards across client projects

Solo-dev CLAUDE.md advice fails at agency scale. The three-layer model (agency-wide / client-specific / per-engagement) we run at Seahawk across 200+ client repositories.

5 May 2026

A clean shelf with eight distinct geometric tools arranged in a precise row, suggesting a curated production stack

The MCP servers I run in production at Seahawk: an honest stack

The MCP ecosystem has 200+ servers; the production stack we actually run is 8. Filesystem, Puppeteer, Postgres, Brave, GitHub, Sentry, Notion, Linear. What we tried and dropped.

5 May 2026

Claude Code for WordPress: the workflow my agency runs in 2026

Claude Code is built for code, not WordPress, but the agency that runs it well ships at 3x velocity. The CLAUDE.md, the MCP stack, and the WordPress workflows that compress most.

5 May 2026