General arrangement
Who is behind the drawings, and why a software studio has a coffee brand.
Naughty Bean Consulting started as the consulting arm of Naughty Bean Coffee, a coffee brand founded in 2024. Running a counter turned out to be an excellent way to discover that hospitality software is either expensive, foreign, or both. So we built our own point of sale. Then our own ordering platform. Then payroll, then operations, then the tools to sell them. Somewhere along the way the software became the business.
The studio is led by Shaun De Ponte, a software engineer who has shipped everything on the register, from Django monoliths that run a till to a multi-account AWS estate for an enterprise client. We stay small on purpose: the person you brief is the person who writes the code and the person who gets paged if it breaks.
What we are for
We build software for businesses that trade in the physical world: shops, kitchens, service teams, property portfolios, payroll offices. Software that has to work on a tablet with greasy fingerprints, on a phone in a stockroom, at 6 a.m. before the first customer. Most of it is web and mobile. Some of it talks to espresso machines, biometric terminals and banks.
We are not a body shop and not an agency. We take on a small number of builds at a time and finish them.
Where
South Africa, working remotely with clients anywhere. We quote in Rand, hold meetings in SAST and have no objection to a client’s own Jira, Slack or Teams. Our own work is tracked in AtlasHub, which we built because we wanted one login.
How we work
Working notes- 1.1
Operators first
We run a coffee business and use our own software behind the counter. That habit of living with the consequences shapes every build: fewer clever abstractions, more thought about what happens when the internet drops mid-shift.
- 1.2
Small on purpose
You talk to the person writing the code. Decisions are made in the conversation, not relayed through an account manager three days later.
- 1.3
Boring technology
Django and PostgreSQL have been unfashionable and reliable for fifteen years. We pick tools your next developer can hire for, and we write down why.
- 1.4
Your code, your accounts
Source lives in your repository from the first commit. Infrastructure lives in your cloud account. If we part ways, you keep everything and it keeps running.
- 1.5
Straight answers
If a brief is a bad idea, or a PWA will do the job of the native app you asked for, or a spreadsheet is honestly fine for now, we say so before you spend money.
- 1.6
Shipped beats perfect
Weekly releases to a staging URL from week one. Real users on real data as early as it is safe. Polish follows evidence.
Tell us what to build.
A web app, a mobile app, a platform, an integration nobody else wants to touch. Send the brief, we reply with questions, a scope and a price.