Write a Review
Claimed Profile
CodigoDelSur is a 15-year-old expert software, web, and mobile app development shop. With a team of more than 150 talented developers & designers excited to incorporate the latest technologies into the more than 200 top-notch applications created so far, we provide outstanding digital products to US enterprises and startups, some of them reaching more than 200 MILLION users!
As a high-quality service provider, we make sure the delivered product is impeccable; thus clients will always receive excellent value for their investment. Aside from technical knowledge, clients are helped with usability, growth hacking, engagement, monetization, and other non-technical knowledge which is just as important when developing software for revolutionary startups. We bring revolutionary ideas to life!
Locations
Uruguay
Av. 19 de Abril 3465,
Montevideo,
Montevideo
11700
+59823378873
Focus Areas
Service Focus
- Mobile App Development
- Web Development
- Software Development
- App Designing (UI/UX)
- Web Designing (UI/UX)
Client Focus
- Medium Business
- Small Business
Industry Focus
- Art, Entertainment & Music
- Business Services
- Education
CodigoDelSur Executive Interview
Nicolas Amarelle
CEO
Please introduce your company and give a brief about your role within the company?
CodigoDelSur is the development company I founded 11 years ago. We work exclusively for US-based companies and startups, and are specialized in Mobile App development but also create Web and custom Software products. In this period, we’re worked on over 200 projects. Startup success cases in our portfolio include Skout (over 220M users), Kindara (#3 fertility app in the US), and Toymail (received funds from Shark Tank), for example.
Regarding my role, I’m the CEO and I define the strategic vision of the company, lead the business development team, and I participate actively in personnel management, as our team is our core value, I’m still involved in the hiring process of new collaborators.
Regarding my role, I’m the CEO and I define the strategic vision of the company, lead the business development team, and I participate actively in personnel management, as our team is our core value, I’m still involved in the hiring process of new collaborators.
What was the idea behind starting this organization?
Well, in fact when it all started, I wasn’t aiming at creating a business and even less would I have imagined it would wind up being an 85 people team and the main software exporter of our country. Everything developed gradually, starting by being only myself developing for the US from my tiny apartment and evolved from there.
What is your company’s business model–in house team or third party vendors/ outsourcing?
CodigoDelSur is a service provider, what we sell is our team’s development hours on a Time & Materials basis. All the work we do is in-house, we’re currently 85 people and they’re all working full time at our office. One important thing about our business model is the fact that we’re not only development providers, but we also play the role of Product Owner, mostly when working for a non-technical client. Our team gets very involved with the client’s business model.
How is your business model beneficial from a value addition perspective to the clients compared to other companies' models?
One of the main points in which we’re different from our competitors is that we don’t work on a fixed budget or timeframe basis. We charge for the hours dedicated to each project, and I believe that translates into generating value constantly. We don’t commit to huge deadlines and work in a hurry just to meet them. Instead, we commit to the backlog generated on each sprint and diligently tackle those tasks, ultimately leading to an increase in the quality of each deliverable. We don’t aim at generating a great number of business deals, we aim at generating high-quality deals, projects that imply a high technical complexity. So that’s our main value, we’re not a large scale software factory, we don’t provide a bulk service for low profile projects; we aim at providing an elite service of small teams and highly technical profile.
What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive?
We’re in the Mobile and Web app industry, but we don’t have a specific vertical we stick to. We’ve worked on several healthcare, education and drone projects, but we’re quite industry agnostic! We’ve worked on projects for most industries really, finance, social networking, broadcasting, agriculture, law; endless. What we’ve seen is that there’s a profile of the sort of clients we have; we’re quite experienced working with startups. We’re actually quite specialized in building products from scratch for startup founders with innovative ideas. Quick prototyping and MVP creation is our main focus.
Mention the objectives or the parameters critical in determining the time frame of developing a web app.
Given we don’t work on a fixed timeframe or fixed budget basis, we don’t normally provide time-based estimations. However, we’re quite confident about the fact that creating a prototype for an app, something not ready to be launched to the market yet but valuable to show to potential investors, to pitch to incubators or national agencies of product creation promotion; takes around 1 and 2 months in general. Then, an MVP (minimum viable product) something that can be launched to the market to validate its original idea, tends to take between 3 and 4 months of development; and creating instead of an MVP, a more mature marketable product takes between 8 and 12 months. So instead of us estimating the features the product needs to have, we go for the Lean methodology, making sure to create what’s required for the product to be valuable for users.
How much effort in terms of time goes into developing the front end and back end of a web app?
As aforementioned, creating an average MVP takes between 3 and 4 months of development and this implies a team working full time comprising a frontend developer, a backend developer and a UX/UI designer who normally works full-time for the first month, and they’re all led by a project manager. We can also incorporate a QA engineer to the team if required, but it all really depends on what the client wants and their budget. So, that’s the average time required to build an average MVP of a web app.
What are the key parameters to be considered before selecting the right platform for a web application?
In general, we always suggest not choosing the “new kid on the block” just because. In these past 10 years we’ve witnessed that there might be various platforms which seem super “hot” at the time and are selected because of that apparent popularity and then even stop existing; such as the cases of Pars, so it’s necessary to be very careful in that sense. It’s always important to find a balance between not choosing a super stable yet outdated platform, and choosing the latest and hottest one just because it seems like the way to go due to a market hype but that winds up not reaching its maturity or has a very reduced amount of development talent who knows it. This is something I always advise on, choosing a platform which is quite widely known so not to generate an over-dependence on a reduced group of specifically qualified people.
Which platform and technologies do you prefer to use in development of your web apps?
We’re currently using Node.js for backend, React.js for frontend which are two of the most popular and modern ones; and that we believe hold those two qualities: stability, critical mass in its communities and being modern from a technological standpoint.
Do you offer website design templates or customized website design, and do you have a responsive website design?
We don’t work on templates, as everything we do is custom made onto creating unique and high-quality experiences. We never work on templates on any of the UI/UX work we undertake, we create user experiences from scratch, with our high profile UX/UI team. And yes, the vast majority of the web products we create require responsiveness.
Which Content Management System do you prefer to use (Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal etc)?
Given the type of products we create, we don’t use CMS and we try to avoid using them. Whenever a CMS has been required by one of our clients we’ve custom created it for them. But if we had to choose among them, the few times we’ve had to use one, we’ve used Wordpress.
Do you provide website maintenance services?
Our speciality is product creation. Once the product has been built, we normally tend to help onboard the project to our clients’ DevOps teams who will later be in charge of its maintenance. We do maintenance for very specific clients due to the close relationship we have with them.
What are the key factors that you consider before deciding the cost of a web application?
We don’t work on a fixed time-frame or fixed budget basis, we work by the hour. We’ve observed that an average MVP costs approximately $80K US dollars, a prototype can cost around $20K US dollars. Nonetheless, it will always depend on the amount of time invested in this product.
What kind of payment structure do you follow to bill your clients? Is it Pay per Feature, Fixed Cost, Pay per Milestone (could be in phases, months, versions etc.)
We charge per hour and specifically per 2-week sprint.
Do you take in projects which meet your basic budget requirement? If yes, what is the minimum requirement? If no, on what minimum budget you have worked for?
The minimum we’ve worked has been a month, so two sprints. That’s technically the minimum engagement we’ve worked for; but in general, there’s not much you can do in a month. This could be the case of someone with a rather advanced prototype who needs to finalize it, but our regular enrollment is for an MVP which is a 3-4 month relationship in average.
What is the price range (min and max) of the projects that you catered to in 2018?
We’ve got a wide variety of projects in this aspect, we’ve had 2 month prototypes which we charged around $20K US dollars for and projects we’ve worked for the entire year with a 20 people team and charging over $1 Million US dollars for. So this varies a lot, according to clients’ needs.
Kindly share your feedback on how GoodFirms has been doing so far in increasing your visibility among potential clients.
GoodFirms has been a great help for clients to find CodigoDelSur, we’ve seen how the site has progressed, and how we continue receiving more contacts through them. They’ve achieved a highly-regarded positioning as a referent with regards to evaluation of different companies in the industry and we’re very happy to witness this growth and to have been considered to be part of their list of high-profile development companies; as well as for this possibility to present our company.
CodigoDelSur Clients & Portfolios
Key Clients
- Grubhub
- Shutterfly
- DroneDeploy
- Emeritus
- Uplift
- Supreme Golf
- Litify
- Ware
- Shred
CodigoDelSur Reviews
5 Reviews
- All Services
- Mobile App Development
- App Designing (UI/UX)
- Web Designing (UI/UX)
- Relevance
- Most Recent
- Rating: high to low
- Rating: low to high
Paulina Barría, CEO and Founder at BiKeLite
Posted on Jan 08, 2020
Simply the Best and most reliable developers I have ever worked
Review Summary
I’ve worked with many companies and I’ve never seen such professionalism. They’re very flexible and committed to my project, making exceptions and showing a great appreciation for it. My Project is a Project with a great potential, but no Budget, but That was not a problem for Código.
I’m so happy with their work that I don’t have anything negative to say.
They’re very professional and one of the best in Latin America in their field. I was surprised by their amazing facilities when I visited their offices—they’re just on another level. Also, their personable approach makes you trust them.
More than developers, I have found an excellent team that has supplied our Company flaws in the technological part, and excellent human beings from the CEO, to the whole Código Team.
They’re a perfectionist, friendly, and responsive team that not only provides regular reporting but also seeks how to improve as a company. I think we couldn't have made a better investment. They have deliver us a very High Quality Product.
Right now with the help of Código del Sur, we have a Solid App for Android, that have won a lot of International Prizes, and has in less than 4 months more than 25.000 downloads worldwide. It is very stable with less than 2% of crashes.
The project was initially planned for Android, We expect to get more funds soon to start developing the iOS version.
They’ve assigned a project manager, a UI/UX specialist, a backend developer, and one or two front end developers. All of them very committed to the success of the project.
From what I can see, they’ve got all the main concepts of the app established, which is very valuable to me. They’re also developing a special algorithm for the app, which is more than what I asked for.
They have a project management platform in place and we have daily meetings on Skype with them, which helps us directly talk about the work progress, our needs, feedback, etc. They also deliver reports and ask for our comments so they can keep improving their processes.
Codigo del Sur is very responsive and fast; whenever we ask for a change, we have it by the next day.
In short, They’ve been the best partner that I could have.
I’m so happy with their work that I don’t have anything negative to say.
They’re very professional and one of the best in Latin America in their field. I was surprised by their amazing facilities when I visited their offices—they’re just on another level. Also, their personable approach makes you trust them.
More than developers, I have found an excellent team that has supplied our Company flaws in the technological part, and excellent human beings from the CEO, to the whole Código Team.
They’re a perfectionist, friendly, and responsive team that not only provides regular reporting but also seeks how to improve as a company. I think we couldn't have made a better investment. They have deliver us a very High Quality Product.
Right now with the help of Código del Sur, we have a Solid App for Android, that have won a lot of International Prizes, and has in less than 4 months more than 25.000 downloads worldwide. It is very stable with less than 2% of crashes.
The project was initially planned for Android, We expect to get more funds soon to start developing the iOS version.
They’ve assigned a project manager, a UI/UX specialist, a backend developer, and one or two front end developers. All of them very committed to the success of the project.
From what I can see, they’ve got all the main concepts of the app established, which is very valuable to me. They’re also developing a special algorithm for the app, which is more than what I asked for.
They have a project management platform in place and we have daily meetings on Skype with them, which helps us directly talk about the work progress, our needs, feedback, etc. They also deliver reports and ask for our comments so they can keep improving their processes.
Codigo del Sur is very responsive and fast; whenever we ask for a change, we have it by the next day.
In short, They’ve been the best partner that I could have.
What service was provided as part of the project?
Mobile App Development, App Designing (UI/UX)
What is it about the company that you appreciate the most?
They’re a perfectionist, friendly, and responsive team that not only provides regular reporting but also seeks how to improve as a company
What was it about the company that you didn't like which they should do better?
I’m so happy with their work that I don’t have anything negative to say.
Betty Messina, Co-Founder at HeelsDown.com
Posted on Nov 22, 2019
Great Company with Outstanding Dev Team!
Review Summary
CodigoDelSur (CDS) was a responsive and diligent web development partner that delivered our MVP, HeelsDown.com, a horseback riding leisure and lessons booking platform. We are a US-based business that worked remotely with CDS in an agile environment in 2-week sprints, always maintaining strong communication with the Dev team in English. Additionally, they were proactive in providing valuable input on development improvements as well as making suggestions on UX/UI designs that enhanced the user's experience.
What service was provided as part of the project?
Web Development, Web Designing (UI/UX)
Robert Childs, Director
Posted on Apr 05, 2017
Carrejun review.
Review Summary
Codigo del Sur was responsive, timely and most of the coders were very experienced and provided good code with few original errors. Their understanding (in English) of some complex concepts was very good so we had no qualms about discussing any technical issues with them. They never tried to play the funny and obstructive games that some software developers use but listened carefully to all discussions and responded as I would expect a professional group should do. I would recommend them anytime.
What was the project name that you have worked with CodigoDelSur?
Carrejun review
What service was provided as part of the project?
Mobile App Development
What is it about the company that you appreciate the most?
Quality code. Responsive to fault & errors found in testing. Easy to work with.
What was it about the company that you didn't like which they should do better?
Sometimes they had obviously not tested their latest version in-house; but mostly they had. So, we occasionally found errors that were very obvious and should have been picked up by an in-house test.
Joseph Jaramillo, Owner at 909 Design
Posted on Mar 31, 2017
Beautiful App.
Review Summary
We were very happy with the skills that CodigoDelSur brought to the table. They helped us understand our service better through their detailed research of our app and made the final product look better than we imagined
What was the project name that you have worked with CodigoDelSur?
Beautiful App
What service was provided as part of the project?
Mobile App Development, Software Development
What is it about the company that you appreciate the most?
Patience, strong development skills, strong project management.
Van Glass, CEO at JSCAPE
Posted on Mar 29, 2017
Andriod & iOS development.
Review Summary
Always delivered on time, well tested and meeting functional requirements.
What was the project name that you have worked with CodigoDelSur?
Mobile App Development
What service was provided as part of the project?
Mobile App Development
What is it about the company that you appreciate the most?
Excellent project manangement and development skills.