A small shop, built to run at a size that usually cannot afford one.
recursiv is a web shop in Switzerland that builds sites, shops, booking systems and internal tools for small businesses — and then, for the ones that want it, runs the weekly work those businesses do by hand.
It is new. There is no client list on this site because there is nothing honest to put on one yet, and inventing one is the single thing that could not be undone later.
What that is worth to you,
and what it costs you.
It costs you a track record, which is a real thing to give up. These four are what is offered instead, and they are only available while the shop is this size.
There is no queue and no other project competing for the same Tuesday. That is a real advantage and it lasts exactly as long as the shop is this size, which is the honest reason to be an early client rather than a late one.
A shop with no portfolio cannot ask you to take anything on trust, so it does not. The code is yours from the first commit, the price is fixed before the work starts, and the monthly cancels monthly. Those terms exist because of the position, not despite it.
It was built by the pipeline it is selling, and it is checked by the same checks on every push. Read it on a phone, tab through it with a keyboard, look at the source, or ask for the check output. That is a smaller claim than a portfolio and it has the advantage of being verifiable.
Not an account manager relaying it, and not a different person each time. The shop is deliberately organised so that the machine does the repetition and a person does the deciding.
There are no photographs of a team on this site, and there is no team to photograph. A stock face beside a quotation is the same fabrication as an invented client logo, and only harder to notice.
A recursive process is one that calls itself: the same steps, applied to their own output, until the thing is done. That is what the pipeline does — read the brief, lay it out, write it, check it, push it, look at it, go round again — and it is what the shop does to itself. The tooling that builds client sites was built by the tooling that builds client sites.
It is also a promise about where the effort goes. Anything done twice gets automated; anything done once gets a person.
Four rules,
and the fourth is the one that compounds.
A person decides
Scope, price, whether we are the right shop for it at all, and every judgement call about your business. If the answer to your enquiry is "you do not need this", it comes from a person and it comes before you have paid anything.
The machine repeats
Layouts, code, checks, deployments, the twentieth booking form. None of that improves by being typed by hand, and all of it is where a normal agency's six weeks go.
A person reads it before you do
Every version that reaches your link has been looked at. The checks catch what checks can catch, which is a lot and is not everything.
Anything that goes wrong becomes a check
A mistake is allowed once. After that it is an assertion that runs on every push, for every client, forever. The check suite is a written history of everything this shop has got wrong.