Your Saint John supply chain runs on tide tables and rail cutoffs SAP has never heard of

Most builds run CAD $70k to $180k, driven by external integrations and forecasting. A core scheduling and customs tool starts near $70k.

They model warehouses and trucks, not tide-driven berth windows, CBSA customs and rail cutoffs. Those constraints are exactly what a Saint John port operation runs on.

Yes, tide-aware berth windows are built in so plans respect real access times. That prevents scheduling a berth the tide will not allow.

Yes, customs milestones and documentation are tracked in one place rather than by email. That reduces holds and surprises at the border.

Plan for 4 to 8 months from discovery to launch. External carrier and customs integrations extend the timeline.

Yes, exception logic forecasts cascading delays so you can react before they hit. Alerts surface on a dashboard rather than after the fact.

Yes, it links to your ERP and warehouse for one connected view. That removes duplicate planning.

Yes, you own the code and integration logic and can host it as you choose. There is no vendor lock-in.

Port and customs logistics experience is specialised, so most shippers use an agency with that background plus local support. Ask for a port or customs integration reference.

For a small business, a focused custom supply chain tool usually lands between $15,000 and $45,000, covering one core workflow like inventory tracking, purchase orders, or shipment visibility. Across 2,000+ delivered projects, Digital Heroes sees most small distributors and light manufacturers start in the $20,000 to $35,000 range for a first working version. Adding barcode scanning, multi-warehouse support, or carrier integrations pushes budgets toward $50,000 and up.

A skilled freelancer is the right call for a single-discipline scope under roughly $15,000, like a website, a plugin, or one integration. Above that, projects need design, backend, testing, and project management at once, and a solo builder becomes the single point of failure: if they get sick or take a bigger client, your project simply stops. Agencies bill 20-40% more per hour but carry continuity, code review, and someone to escalate to, which is what you are actually buying.

You should own it outright, with full IP assignment on payment written into the contract, and you should walk away from any agency that only licenses the software to you. Insist on the code living in a repository under your own GitHub or GitLab account from day one, not handed over at the end. Digital Heroes contracts assign all custom code, database schemas, and documentation to the client; the only carve-outs should be clearly listed open source libraries.

You should, completely, through a written intellectual property assignment that transfers everything on final payment; without that clause, copyright stays with whoever wrote the code by default. Insist that the repository lives in your own GitHub organization from day one and that hosting, domains, and third-party accounts are registered to you. Also check for licenses to the agency's proprietary frameworks buried in the contract, because those can make switching vendors practically impossible even when you own your own code.

For anything past a single-user internal tool, use an agency or an established team, because supply chain systems need backend, frontend, integration, and QA skills that rarely live in one freelancer. A solo developer can build a $10,000 inventory tracker; a system that talks to your ERP, carriers, and warehouse scanners fails badly when its only author is unreachable during a shipping cutoff. In the proposals Digital Heroes sees clients compare, agencies cost 20 to 50 percent more but give you continuity, code review, and someone answerable when order data stops flowing.

A one-page brief beats a 40-page requirements document: the business problem in plain words, who will use the system, the 5 to 10 workflows it must handle, the tools it must connect to, and your budget range and deadline driver. You do not need wireframes, a specification, or technical vocabulary; producing those is the agency's job during discovery. Stating a budget range up front is the single best move, because it gets you honest scoping instead of a quote engineered to win the meeting.

Almost always yes, through CSV exports or the vendor's API, and migration should be scoped as its own workstream with field mapping, a dry run, and a planned cutover window rather than an afterthought. The real time sink is rarely moving the data; it is cleaning it, since years of duplicates, free-text fields, and inconsistent formats surface all at once. Pull a full export from your current vendor before committing to anything new, because some SaaS plans restrict exports on lower tiers.

At minimum: role-based access control, encryption in transit and at rest, audit logs on inventory and order changes, and tested backups, because the system holds supplier pricing and customer purchase history your competitors would love to see. If enterprise customers connect to it, expect security questionnaires and possibly SOC 2 expectations; food, pharma, and aerospace add traceability rules like FDA lot tracking or ITAR data handling. Raise these in the first scoping call, since retrofitting audit trails onto a live system costs far more than designing them in.

The top three: replacing every system at once instead of one workflow at a time, skipping data cleanup so the new system inherits years of bad SKUs and phantom stock, and designing screens without the warehouse staff who will use them daily. A fourth is underscoping integrations and discovering mid-project that the ERP connection is half the work. Digital Heroes sees more supply chain projects fail from scope and data problems than from any technical cause.

Digital Heroes builds custom supply chain software systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. The work is delivered remotely: our engineers work from Delhi and Lucknow, leadership is in New York, and some team members live in London and Sydney and work remotely from there. We have no office in Saint John. You can chat with the team directly, and every form gets an email reply within 24 hours.