American Software Solutions
About
Small team. No handoffs.
American Software Solutions is a small group of developers — friendly, endlessly curious, building full-stack software since 1993, and still around when the thing we shipped needs looking after.
Since
1993 — when a Pentium 60, 4 MB of RAM and a 14.4k modem was a development environment. Today's phone beats all of it by thousands. The hard part hasn't moved.
Scope
Full stack. Database, backend, interface, the server it runs on, and the DNS record pointing at it.
Method
Experience as the force multiplier. Most problems are a variant of one we've solved before — recognising which one is most of the work.
Thirty-odd years of shipping
The founding machine was a Commodore VIC-20 — 5 KB of memory, a cassette deck for storage, and BASIC waiting at a cursor the second you switched it on. Nothing stood between you and the machine, and nothing was going to help you either. You read the manual, typed it in, and found out the hard way which line was wrong. Everything here still runs on that habit.
Software has changed shape several times since 1993 — desktop to web, web to mobile, servers you could touch to servers rented by the hour. Each of those arrived billed as the thing that would make building software easy. None of them did. What they actually moved was the floor: the boring parts got cheap, and the judgement got more valuable, not less.
What hasn't changed at all is the part that decides whether a project works — understanding the business well enough to know which problem is the real one, and then building the simplest thing that solves it. That was the job on a 14.4k modem and it's the job now.
That long a run leaves you with opinions. Ours are mostly about restraint. Most systems fail from accumulated cleverness rather than missing features, so the interesting work is usually subtraction — fewer moving parts, fewer dependencies, fewer places for a Tuesday afternoon to go wrong.
No handoffs, on purpose
There's no account manager here, and no handoff to a delivery team you haven't met. The people who scope the work are the people who write it, deploy it, and pick up the phone when it misbehaves at an inconvenient hour. That keeps the loop short and the context intact.
It also sets an honest limit on how much we take on at once, which is deliberate. A small number of projects, properly looked after, beats a queue of them half-attended.
What you end up owning
- The source, in your repository, readable and documented.
- The data, in a format you can export without asking.
- The infrastructure, in accounts with your name on them.
- A handover that assumes someone else may maintain this one day.
Plenty of the work is under agreement and stays that way, so this page is short on client names by design. If you want to know whether something similar has been built before, ask directly — that's a conversation, not a portfolio page. Enquiries reach the owner, Don, and get answered rather than routed.