People Bunch · HR and people management, UK
Four years of shipping for an HR platform
People Bunch came to Poiema for a project. They stayed for a retained senior developer and a production platform we host, monitor and maintain.
The starting point
People Bunch is a UK HR and people platform. When we started working together in 2022 they needed a web platform built to a written scope, on a fixed budget. That is how most of our relationships begin.
What changed
Once the platform was live, the work did not stop. There were new features on the roadmap, integrations to add, and a production system that needed someone responsible for it. Instead of quoting project after project, we moved to a monthly retainer: thirty hours a week of senior developer capacity, with Alex as technical director reviewing architecture and priorities.
What we run
Poiema provisions and manages the AWS infrastructure for both production and staging. That covers backups, monitoring, uptime and security patches, for a fixed monthly price with AWS costs included. Hosting is priced in steps tied to their user base, so the bill grows with the business rather than ahead of it.
Recent work
The latest features include AI-assisted document upload and extraction, built on the same platform and shipped by the retained developer under the same monthly arrangement.
Why it works
People Bunch has one number to budget for each month and one senior engineer who knows their codebase. Poiema has a client relationship that has lasted longer than most agencies’ entire client lists. Prices are reviewed once a year, in writing, and nothing changes mid-year.
We came to Poiema in 2022 for a one-off build. Four years later they're still our engineering team. Alex reviews the architecture, and we have a senior developer who knows our codebase inside out and ships continuously. They also run our AWS production and staging environments, so backups, monitoring and security are simply handled, all for one predictable monthly number. Most recently they built AI-assisted document upload and extraction into the platform. For a small company that needs software done properly without hiring an in-house team, I can't recommend them enough.