FirstLight®
FirstLight is a design & engineering studio. We take websites, mobile apps, web platforms, desktop software and AI products from first sketch to first light — one senior team, accountable for all of it.
Every great product begins in the dark.
We build toward the light.
FIRSTLIGHT® — THE BELIEF BEHIND THE NAME
TWELVE RECENT ENGAGEMENTS.
EVERY ONE DESIGNED AND BUILT
IN-HOUSE.
An eco-yacht charter needed to feel as considered as the boats themselves. We built a destination-led booking experience — editorial storytelling up front, availability and enquiry flows underneath — so the brand sells restraint and responsibility, not cabins.
Forty-plus screens spanning rooms, live video, shows, wallet and payouts — unified by one dual-theme design system. The brief was trust at the transaction layer; the answer was deliberately calm money UX inside an otherwise electric product.
A fintech's settings screen was doing its job quietly — and quietly losing trust. We rebuilt the hierarchy: grouped by intent, security surfaced, everything a thumb-reach away.
DRAG THE HANDLE — ARROW KEYS WORK TOO
NO HAND-OFFS TO JUNIORS.
NO MYSTERY SUBCONTRACTORS.
THE PEOPLE ON YOUR FIRST CALL
SHIP YOUR PRODUCT.
Flagship sites, campaign pages and storefronts engineered around one question: what should the visitor do next? Fast loads, clean ranks, obvious paths — measured by enquiries, not applause.
STRATEGY · CUSTOM UI · CMS / E-COMMERCE · MOTION · TECHNICAL SEO · ANALYTICS
Research, flows and prototypes that remove doubt before it costs money. Designed in Figma and reviewed on real content — never lorem ipsum — so every screen is pressure-tested before build.
USER RESEARCH · UX AUDITS · WIREFRAMES · DESIGN SYSTEMS · HI-FI UI · USABILITY TESTING
SaaS products, dashboards and client portals architected for scale — auth, roles, billing, APIs, admin — shipped with the documentation your team needs to own them outright.
ARCHITECTURE · API DESIGN · AUTH & BILLING · ADMIN PANELS · CLOUD & DEVOPS
Mobile products with a native feel — offline-capable, store-ready and instrumented from the first build. From consumer apps to internal tools your team actually opens.
REACT NATIVE / FLUTTER · PUSH & OFFLINE · STORE DEPLOYMENT · PRODUCT ANALYTICS
Cross-platform desktop software that earns a permanent place in the dock — signed, auto-updating and integrated deep into macOS, Windows and Linux.
ELECTRON / TAURI · OS INTEGRATIONS · AUTO-UPDATES · SIGNED INSTALLERS
Practical AI, wired into products people already use: copilots inside your app, assistants trained on your documents, workflows that run themselves. Scoped against a benchmark, shipped behind a flag, measured against a real metric.
LLM COPILOTS & CHAT · RAG ON YOUR DATA · AGENTS & WORKFLOWS · AI SEARCH · EVAL PIPELINES · OPENAI / ANTHROPIC / GEMINI
FOUNDED 2026 · REMOTE-FIRST
OPERATING WORLDWIDE
US + EU OVERLAP, DAILY
FirstLight is deliberately small. Two projects at a time. Senior hands only. No account managers translating between you and the people doing the work. We would rather ship less — and have everything we ship be the reference — than scale into the kind of agency we built this one to escape.
The work you saw in our portfolio is the work you get. The same hands, start to finish.
Designers and engineers sit in the same weekly review. What you approve is what ships — pixel for pixel.
Every project is scoped and priced before kickoff. If we underestimate, that cost is ours.
Your repo, your Figma, your analytics, your IP — transferred on final payment. No lock-in, no hostage files.
BIG BUDGETS DIE FROM AMBIGUITY.
YOU WILL ALWAYS KNOW WHAT’S
HAPPENING, WHAT’S NEXT, AND
WHAT IT COSTS.
We interrogate the goal, not just the brief — who it’s for, what it must achieve, how we’ll measure success. You leave with a scoped proposal, fixed price and timeline.
OUTPUTS — PRODUCT BRIEF · SITEMAP · TECHNICAL PLAN · FIXED QUOTEWireframes to high-fidelity UI, reviewed on real content. You click through a working prototype of the entire product before a single line of code is written.
OUTPUTS — WIREFRAMES · UI DESIGN · DESIGN SYSTEM · PROTOTYPEClean, documented code on a staging link you can open any day of the week. Friday demos keep scope honest; automated tests keep regressions out.
OUTPUTS — STAGING BUILDS · WEEKLY DEMOS · TEST COVERAGEPerformance passes, accessibility, technical SEO, analytics and a choreographed deploy. We stay glued to the dashboards for the first 72 hours.
OUTPUTS — QA SIGN-OFF · DEPLOYMENT · ANALYTICS DASHBOARDSThirty days of included fixes after every launch, then retainers for iteration and growth. Your product keeps improving long after the confetti.
OUTPUTS — 30-DAY WARRANTY · ROADMAP · GROWTH EXPERIMENTSEVERY ENGAGEMENT STARTS WITH
A FREE SCOPING CALL AND ENDS
WITH THE PRICE IN WRITING —
BEFORE ANY WORK BEGINS.
Support copilots, document Q&A, workflow automation — built on OpenAI, Anthropic or Gemini, trained on your data, and shipped behind a feature flag with a two-week benchmark. If the numbers hold, we roll it out properly. If they don’t, we say so — and you keep the pilot.
RAG ON YOUR DOCS · EVAL & BENCHMARK REPORT · GUARDRAILS & HUMAN HANDOFF · FEATURE-FLAGGED LAUNCH
PAYMENT — 40% KICKOFF · 40% MIDPOINT DEMO · 20% LAUNCH PROGRAMMES $40K+ PHASED BY MILESTONE
PER-SERVICE FLOORS — WEBSITES $3,500 · WEB APPS $11,500 · MOBILE $13,500 · DESKTOP $9,800 · AI PILOTS $5,000
POST-LAUNCH RETAINERS FROM $1,800/MO INVOICING IN USD, GBP, EUR OR ₦
OUR PRICING LOGIC, IN PUBLIC.
THE SAME MATH WE RUN ON
SCOPING CALLS — RUN IT
YOURSELF, FIRST.
ANYTHING ELSE? ASK DIRECTLY —
A SENIOR REPLIES, USUALLY
WITHIN HOURS.
Landing sites run 2–3 weeks, full websites 4–6 weeks, and mobile or web apps 8–12 weeks to a first release. Your proposal includes a week-by-week timeline — and we hit it.
Fixed price, agreed in writing before kickoff: 40% to start, 40% at the midpoint demo, 20% at launch. Programmes above $40k are phased by milestone so risk stays low on both sides.
Yes — the studio is remote-first and most engagements run with the US and Europe. You get at least four hours of live overlap with the East Coast (a full working day with Europe), Friday video demos, async Loom walkthroughs between calls, and a shared board you can check any day.
You do — completely. Code lives in your repository from day one, designs in your Figma, and full IP transfer is written into every contract upon final payment.
Often, yes. We start with a paid technical and design audit — a fixed-fee document covering what to keep, what to fix and what to rebuild — then you decide whether we’re the ones to do it.
Every launch includes 30 days of fixes at no cost. After that, most clients move to a retainer for iteration and experiments — but there’s no obligation, and we hand over clean documentation either way.
Yes — most AI work starts exactly there. We begin with a fixed-fee pilot behind a feature flag: one measurable use-case (support drafting, document Q&A, workflow automation), benchmarked for two weeks. If the numbers hold, we roll it out properly. If they don’t, we say so and you keep the pilot code.
A FEW LINES IS ENOUGH. WITHIN
24 HOURS A SENIOR REPLIES WITH
HONEST THOUGHTS ON SCOPE,
BUDGET AND TIMELINE.