Your Innovation Partner for the AI Age

Old.St Labs is a software development agency. We design and build mobile and web applications with AI woven into them, working as an innovation partner to make sure what we build actually drives value in your business. We do the discovery, design and engineering, and we stay involved after launch to keep evolving the product with you.

Old.St Labs is based in London, with our delivery team across the Philippines and Cape Town. The founders and senior consulting team are in London. Day-to-day design, engineering, QA and project management runs across our global team in working hours that overlap fully with the UK working day.

It depends on what you want to build. With modern AI-enabled development, we can have a working prototype in front of you in a matter of days. A first usable version of a product typically takes weeks rather than months. A polished, production-ready product with the full set of features you want generally takes a few months. The biggest variable isn't the technology, it's how many features and integrations you want to include.

It really depends on what you want to build. Engagements range from around £10,000 for smaller focused projects up to £100,000 and beyond for larger or multi-phase programmes. We quote on either a fixed-price or hourly basis depending on what fits the project; we'll recommend the model that suits the work. If scope changes mid-project, you see the change and the cost before it happens.

Both founders are involved in every project, so you're never handed off to a junior account manager. Day-to-day delivery is led by a senior product manager working with a dedicated team of designers, engineers, QAs and project managers from our Philippines and Cape Town teams. We look after our people, so the same team that starts your project is the team that finishes it.

Yes. Old.St Labs has restructured our internal build stack around AI-enabled development. That means prototypes in days, faster iteration cycles, and meaningfully better economics for our clients. Crucially, AI accelerates our team rather than replacing them. Senior engineers still own the architecture, code quality and security decisions. The result is that you get more software, faster, without the corners that get cut when AI is doing the work alone.

Almost certainly, yes. Pretty much everything we build now incorporates AI in some form, from straightforward LLM features (chat, summarisation, classification, document understanding) through to agentic systems that take actions and complete workflows on the user's behalf. AI isn't a tick-box add-on for us; it's part of how we think about every product brief.

Agentic AI means software that doesn't just answer questions but takes actions on a user's behalf, like booking a meeting, processing an invoice, or completing a multi-step workflow. It's most useful when there's a repeatable process with several steps that would otherwise burn human time. We can advise on whether it's a fit for what you're building. The answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no; both are honest.

Old.St Labs builds mobile apps (iOS, Android, B2B, B2C, internal), web applications, management dashboards, internal tools, AI-driven workflow automation, and bespoke replacements for off-the-shelf SaaS that no longer fits. We've delivered more than 60 products since 2020 across industries including education, healthcare, finance, property, fitness, ecommerce, not-for-profit and several others.

Most of the AI-integrated products we've built have been delivered in the last 12 to 18 months, which is when serious AI capability became available to plug into customer-facing software. Our team has been continuously learning, prototyping and shipping with the major AI tools (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, plus open-source models) as the landscape has evolved. We don't claim to have been doing this for a decade because nobody has.

The difference shows up at the start. Before we propose a build, we put serious time into understanding your business, your customers, the workflow we're being asked to improve, and what success actually looks like for you. Both founders come from an entrepreneurial background, which is why this matters to us. Most agencies want to start writing code; we want to make sure what we write is the right thing in the first place. That focus on discovery before development is the single biggest reason our clients say they stay with us.

Four stages: Definition, Design, Development and Partnership. AI-enabled prototyping now sits inside both Definition and Design, so you can interact with a working version of what you're buying before we start building it for real. Development runs Agile with regular demos. Partnership is what comes after launch, the ongoing relationship where we keep evolving what we built together.

For most of our clients, launch is the start of a longer innovation partnership, not the end of a project. We continue to work with you to evolve the product based on what real users tell you, build new features, and apply new AI capabilities as they become available. Several of our client relationships are now four to five years long; we measure ourselves by retention more than by initial sale.

You do. All code, designs and intellectual property created in your engagement transfer to you in full on payment. That's covered in our standard contract. We don't retain rights, licence the work back to you, or build in dependencies you can't extract.

Yes. We do this regularly, including for products built on AI tools like Lovable, Replit, Cursor and Bolt. The starting point is usually an audit to understand what you have and what condition it's in, then a clear plan for what to keep, what to refactor, and what to rebuild. We're honest if a fresh start is faster than the rescue; we don't have an incentive to recommend one over the other.

Yes. Where we've built an innovation partnership with a client, our team often works fully embedded with theirs, joint standups, shared tooling, shared backlog. That's one of the things we enjoy most. It works particularly well where you have a strong product or technical lead in-house and need delivery capacity around them.

Yes. Our case studies cover a cross-section of products we've shipped, and we're happy to walk you through the ones most relevant to your problem on a call. We can also provide direct client references for engagements at a similar scale to yours.

We're comfortable signing NDAs and do so routinely before any detailed conversation about your product. Our team works under confidentiality obligations as a matter of course, and we follow standard practice around data residency, GDPR compliance and access control. If your context has specific security or regulatory requirements, raise them early and we'll talk through how we handle them.

Yes. We deliberately structure work in phases so the first engagement can be modest, a discovery sprint, a prototype, an audit, or a contained MVP. That lets both sides find out whether we're a good fit before committing to anything bigger. Many of our long-term client relationships started with a small piece of scoping work.

Old.St Labs works with founders, product teams, and SMEs who want to build something genuinely useful and don't have the in-house team to do it on their own. UK and US clients across multiple industries. The common thread is that they value working with a partner who'll push back on the brief if it isn't right, not just take the order.