Correctness before cleverness
A clever solution nobody can reason about is a liability. We'd rather write the obvious version, prove it behaves, and keep it readable than win an argument about elegance.
Independent software studio
Small studio. Serious software.
Beratna Labs builds and ships its own software. Two products are out and in real use — Portari for managed file transfer, CoverText for Shopify accessibility — with more on the bench behind them, each carrying its real status rather than the marketing version.
Built to last
Maintainable by design, not by luck
Accessible
WCAG AA as the baseline
Fast
Performance budgeted from the start
In the open
Real status, no vapourware
How we build
Six things we don't cut corners on
None of this is novel. It's just the set of habits that separates software you can still trust in five years from software that quietly rots.
Performance is a requirement
Speed gets budgeted at the start, not bolted on after someone complains. Pages and screens are measured on real hardware, not just whatever is on our desk.
Accessible by default
Keyboard navigation, sane contrast, real labels, and markup that means something to a screen reader. Treated as part of "finished" rather than a later ticket nobody picks up.
Documented while we build
Notes written at the moment a decision gets made, not reconstructed months later from memory. Future us is a different person, and they deserve better than a guess.
Your data stays yours
No selling it, no quietly mining it, no burying the terms in a settings page six clicks deep. If a feature only works by harvesting something, we'd rather not ship the feature.
Boring, durable technology
We pick tools that will still be maintained in five years over whatever trended last month. Novelty is a cost, and it's usually paid by whoever maintains the thing next.
From idea to beta
How something becomes real
Every item on our roadmap sits at one of these four stages, and we label it honestly — including the ones barely off the ground.
01 · Research
Is this worth solving?
We talk to people who actually have the problem before writing anything. Plenty of ideas die here, which is the cheapest place for them to die.
02 · Design
What is it, exactly?
Scope, screens, and the data model get worked out on paper first. We decide what the thing deliberately will not do, which matters as much as what it will.
03 · Build
Make it work, properly
Code, tests, and documentation together. The goal at this stage isn't a demo — it's something that holds up when a real person uses it on a bad day.
04 · Beta
Put it in real hands
A small group uses it for real work and tells us what's wrong. It only leaves beta when we'd be comfortable depending on it ourselves.
Our approach
Patient by design
Software gets worse when it's rushed to hit a date somebody picked in a meeting. We've set this studio up so we don't have to do that.
- We ship when it's right, not when a quarter ends. No arbitrary launch date to work backwards from, so quality doesn't become the thing that gets cut.
- We build things we'd use ourselves. Every idea here started as a problem we hit directly. It's a narrow filter, and a good one.
- Every idea has to survive "should this exist?" If something already solves the problem well, the right move is to use that and go work on something else.
- Status on this site is the real status. If something is at eight percent, it says eight percent. We'd rather look early than look dishonest.
The toolkit
Boring tools, chosen on purpose
Technology picked because it will still be maintained in five years — not because it was trending last month.
- C#
- .NET
- HTML5
- CSS3
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- React
- Node.js
- Python
- PostgreSQL
- Powershell
- SQL Server
- REST & JSON APIs
- Azure
- AWS
- Docker
- Git
- CI/CD
Live now
Two products you can actually run
Portari moves files between systems you don't control and accounts for every one of them. CoverText finds the images in a Shopify store that are missing alt text and writes it. Behind them is a roadmap with honest status attached to every item, including the ones barely started.
Stay in the loop
Know when the next one ships
One email when something enters beta. No newsletter, no drip campaign, no selling your address to anyone.