Reviewed by Dr. Dmytro Nasyrov, Founder and CTO
We build reliable, secure and high-performance server-side architectures for applications of any complexity.
We build reliable, secure and high-performance server-side architectures for applications of any complexity. Our engineers create scalable APIs, integrate third-party systems and optimize data workflows to support long-term product growth.
Businesses choose custom software over off-the-shelf products when they need solutions tailored to unique workflows, compliance requirements and growth targets. According to Grand View Research (2024), the global custom software development market is valued at over $35 billion and is projected to grow at 22.3% CAGR through 2030. Pharos Production delivers full-cycle custom development across three core areas: blockchain and smart contracts, web applications and mobile apps.
We build secure, scalable APIs and microservices that allow smooth communication between systems. This architecture improves flexibility and speeds up feature delivery throughout your product ecosystem.
Explore API and Microservices DevelopmentWe build robust backend architectures tailored to your business logic and performance needs. This ensures a clean structure, easy maintenance and dependable operation under heavy workloads.
Explore Server-Side Application ArchitectureWe create efficient database schemas and optimize queries to boost performance and stability. This results in quicker data access, lower latency and improved overall application performance.
Explore Database Design and OptimizationWe develop back-end services optimized for AWS, GCP or Azure using cloud-native patterns. This improves scalability, resilience and cost efficiency for your infrastructure.
Explore Cloud-Native Backend EngineeringWe build distributed backend systems capable of handling millions of requests reliably, supporting real-time processing and continuous service uptime.
Explore Scalable Distributed Systems DevelopmentWe implement secure user authentication, access control and permission frameworks that follow industry best practices. This protects sensitive data and guarantees that only authorized users can access key features.
Explore Authentication and Authorization ImplementationWe incorporate automated testing, deployment pipelines and infrastructure workflows into your backend, shortening release cycles and reducing errors during production deployments.
Explore DevOps-Ready CI/CD Backend IntegrationWe build efficient data pipelines and automation workflows for intensive computational tasks. This method offers real-time insights, speeds up processing and simplifies business operations.
Explore High-Performance Data Processing and AutomationCustom backends give you full control over data model, performance and unit economics, while BaaS platforms (Supabase, Firebase, Hasura, AWS Amplify) ship CRUD MVPs in days. According to a 2024 State of Backend Development survey, 64% of teams start on a BaaS and 38% migrate to custom within 24 months when traffic, compliance or cost forces the move.
| Factor | Custom backend | Backend-as-a-Service |
|---|---|---|
| Data model fit | Exact fit; tailored aggregates, joins, indexes, partitioning | Generic relational or document model; opinionated |
| Performance | Tunable to your workload; sub-millisecond p99 achievable | Bound by vendor infrastructure and shared tenancy |
| Cost at scale | Fixed engineering cost; marginal cost decreases with usage | Per-row, per-request and per-egress billing scales linearly |
| Compliance | Full control over data residency, encryption, audit logs, retention | Inherited from platform; some workloads ineligible |
| Integration | Native integration with your downstream systems and identity | Webhook/SDK; deep integration limited |
| Time to MVP | 6-10 weeks for a production-grade API | Days for a basic CRUD app |
| Vendor lock-in | None; portable to any infrastructure | Strong lock-in on data model and authentication |
| Best fit | Complex business logic, regulated industries, scale, custom unit economics | CRUD MVPs, internal tools, prototypes, low-traffic apps |
Our team of 90+ engineers covers the full development stack, from Solidity smart contracts and React front-ends to Kubernetes infrastructure and automated QA pipelines. Since 2013, we have delivered 110+ applications for clients across FinTech, healthcare, crypto, e-commerce and 14 other industries. Across verified Clutch reviews, our clients report an average 40% improvement in transaction processing speed, a 95% on-time delivery rate and an 87% client retention rate across multi-year engagements. Below are selected projects that demonstrate our capabilities in action.
Pharos Production collaborated with a taxi aggregator platform to develop a high-load ride-hailing application that connects passengers and drivers in real time. This platform consolidates various fleets and independent drivers into a single system, ensuring quick ride matching, live tracking and transparent pricing. Built on a cloud-native infrastructure, the solution offers low-latency interactions, reliable trip processing and scalability for operations at the city and regional levels.
Pharos Production has partnered with Sagas to create a location-aware social platform that enables users to capture, publish and explore geo-located timelapses over time. This system combines real-time data ingestion, large-scale media processing and map-centric discovery to transform physical locations into dynamic digital stories. Leveraging cloud-native infrastructure and event-driven architecture, Sagas allows users to document urban changes, natural evolution and personal moments tied to specific places. The result is a scalable social network where time and location are central to content discovery.
Pharos Production has partnered with PumpTap to develop a secure, high-performance crypto wallet tailored for everyday Web3 interactions. PumpTap lets users store, send and manage digital assets across multiple blockchains through a simple, intuitive interface. Built on a scalable, event-driven architecture, the wallet delivers real-time transaction updates, robust security and seamless integration with decentralized applications.
Pharos Production has partnered with Pulse to create a community-driven social network that connects users with local stores through challenges, engagement activities and real-world prizes. This platform transforms everyday local interactions into interactive experiences, enabling users to earn rewards from participating merchants. Built on a scalable, event-driven architecture, Pulse facilitates real-time interactions between users and businesses and supports rapid growth across cities and regions.
Pharos Production partnered with Pro Gambling to build a high-load sports forecasting platform focused on data-driven predictions, real-time analytics and scalable delivery of betting insights. The platform aggregates large volumes of sports data, odds movements and historical statistics to generate forecasts that help users make informed betting decisions. Built on a cloud-native, event-driven architecture, Pro Gambling delivers fast updates, transparent analytics and consistent performance during peak sports events.
Pharos Production has partnered with Pleenk to build a secure, scalable payments platform for fast transactions, fraud prevention and seamless integration with digital products. The platform processes payment flows in real time while maintaining high levels of security, transparency and reliability for both businesses and end users. Built on cloud-native infrastructure and an event-driven architecture, Pleenk provides a strong foundation for modern digital payments.
Pharos Production partnered with NoMoreBets to develop a worldwide one-tap live betting platform focused on speed and scalability. The system handles real-time odds and instant bets effortlessly. The result is a smooth, engaging betting experience that increased player retention, reduced drop-offs during live matches and positioned NoMoreBets for global growth since 2022.
Pharos Production partnered with Nextcheck to replace outdated, manual onboarding with a secure, automated KYC/AML platform. Built on AWS, Kubernetes, Istio, Elixir, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL and NextJS, the platform provides real-time biometric and document verification, risk assessment and compliance reporting. Since 2019, Nextcheck has reduced onboarding time by 60%, cut manual labor by 70% and expanded to support thousands of checks at once. Today, it powers global banks, FinTechs and crypto firms with a cloud-native, regulation-ready, growth-oriented compliance platform.
Founder and CTO Pharos Production
I design and build reliable software solutions - from lightweight apps to high-load distributed systems and blockchain platforms.
PhD in Artificial Intelligence, MSc in Computer Science (with honors), MSc in Electronics & Precision Mechanics.
13 years in architecture of great software solutions tailored to customer needs for startups and enterprises
23 years of practical enterprise customized software production experience
Lecturer at the National Kyiv Polytechnic University
Doctor of Philosophy in Artificial Intelligence
Master’s degree in Computer Science, completed with excellence
Master’s degree in Electronics and precision mechanics engineering
Backend projects follow Pharos Verified Delivery with API-specific gates: discovery models the data and API contract; build includes integration tests at 80%+ coverage and load test harness; production readiness covers monitoring, alerting, runbooks and graceful degradation; support includes 4-hour SLA on critical issues.
Pharos Verified Delivery applied to 110+ production applications since 2013
Three anonymized backend engagements where architectural decisions produced measurable outcomes. Baselines client-reported, metrics independently verified.
Monolithic Rails backend hit p99 latency of 4.2 seconds during peak betting windows. 14 production incidents in the last quarter. Engineering team afraid to deploy on Sunday mornings.
Selective extraction to Go services for hot paths (odds, bet placement, settlement). p99 latency dropped to 180ms. Zero peak-window incidents in 4 months post-cutover. Deployment frequency went from weekly to multiple times per day.
We extracted three services that owned 85% of the request volume and left the rest as a Rails monolith. Cutover used a request shadowing pattern - every request hit both stacks for 2 weeks before the new stack became authoritative.
Synchronous request chains across 7 microservices. One slow downstream caused cascading timeouts. Reconciliation reports lagged 18 hours behind real-time.
Kafka event bus with idempotent consumers and outbox pattern. Reconciliation lag down to 90 seconds. Cascading failures eliminated. Each service can be deployed independently.
The outbox pattern is the key - every state change writes to a local ledger table inside the same database transaction, then a separate process publishes to Kafka. No dual-write inconsistency, no lost events on crash.
3 different backend APIs powering web, mobile and partner integrations. Drift between them caused 1-2 production bugs per week. Schema changes required coordinated releases across 3 teams.
Single GraphQL API with persisted queries and federated subgraphs. Bug rate dropped 70%. Schema changes ship in one PR. Mobile and web teams iterate independently behind a stable contract.
GraphQL federation let us ship the consolidation incrementally - each subgraph migrated one bounded context at a time, with the gateway routing between old REST and new GraphQL during the transition. No big-bang cutover.
Client names anonymized under NDA. Full case studies at /cases/.
We decline roughly 30% of RFPs we receive. Forcing a bad fit costs both sides 3-6 months and damages outcomes. Here is how we think about scope:
Custom backend makes sense when you need complex business logic, integration with proprietary systems, regulatory data residency, real-time scale or unit economics that BaaS pricing breaks. Otherwise, Backend-as-a-Service platforms (Supabase, Firebase, Hasura, AWS Amplify) ship faster and operate cheaper. We have built MVPs on Supabase and migrated to custom only after the platform hit a real wall.
Engagement model, pricing and case studies for software projects including the backend track.
Observations distilled from 48 back-end engagements delivered between 2019 and 2026 across FinTech, logistics, healthcare and SaaS.
Teams of 4 to 8 engineers reach DORA "High" performance within 6 months when we introduce trunk-based flow and contract tests on week one.
The single highest-impact intervention in 70 percent of rescues was splitting one shared relational database into bounded contexts with clear write ownership.
Services with structured logging plus tracing from day one had 3.1x lower MTTR than services that bolted observability on after launch.
Rewrite projects succeed when we preserve the legacy as a source of truth for 90 days of dual-run; bypassing that step correlated with 4 of 6 rollbacks in our records.
Back-end platforms in 2026 are converging on three patterns: typed edge-to-core data flows, polyglot persistence with clear ownership boundaries and service meshes that treat observability as a first-class product concern. Teams that still run monolithic PHP or unstructured Node services are hitting latency and on-call debt that forces modernisation by end of 2027.
DORA 2024 findings put elite performers at sub-one-hour lead time and under 5 percent change failure rate[1]. Back-end teams drive these numbers with trunk-based flow and small, reversible deploys.
ThoughtWorks Radar keeps promoting typed contracts (Protobuf, OpenAPI with JSON Schema) and moving REST-only services to "Hold" when they lack contract tests[3].
Google SRE Workbook shows SLOs based on error budget consumption outperform uptime SLAs for steering engineering investment[4].
NIST SSDF mandates producing SBOMs, signing artefacts and gating releases on dependency posture, now a common audit line item for regulated customers[9].
Before accepting a new back-end from any vendor, run this 8-point check. We apply the same list on Pharos Production internal code reviews.
Under 250 ms for transactional endpoints, under 1 s for aggregate queries, with p99.9 tracked separately.
Under 10 percent on a 30-day rolling window[1].
Under 1 hour with documented runbooks and paged ownership[4].
100 percent of external endpoints covered by schema tests, 80 percent by consumer-driven tests[3].
All migrations reversible or feature-flagged, zero-downtime verified on staging.
OWASP Top 10 mitigations mapped per endpoint, authenticated SAST and DAST in CI[8].
SBOM generated on every build, signed artefacts, pinned base images[9].
Traces, metrics and structured logs on every request, correlation IDs end to end.
A logistics customer migrated from a PHP monolith to a Go service fleet in 2024. Load tests looked clean but the first production week logged 312 duplicate shipments on order retry bursts. Root cause: three services accepted POST without idempotency keys and the upstream queue retried on any 5xx. We shipped a cross-cutting middleware that derived idempotency keys from payload hashes and persisted them in Redis with 24-hour TTL, then re-ran the retry playbook. Duplicate rate dropped to zero within 48 hours and never came back. The lesson we standardised: no back-end service enters production without an idempotency contract on every state-changing endpoint[5].
Independent reviews from Clutch, GoodFirms and Google - verified client feedback on our software projects
Based on 10 verified client reviews
Trusted by Coinbase, Consensys, Core Scientific, MicroStrategy, Gate.io and 10+ more Web3 and enterprise platforms
16+ partnersOur 16 technology partners include:
Reviewed by Dmytro Nasyrov
Founder and CTO
23+ years in custom software development. Led 110+ projects across FinTech, healthcare, Web3 and enterprise, ISO 27001-aligned team.
Pharos Production offers three project models, MVP, Full-fledged Production and Full-cycle Development, priced from $10,000 to $80,000. An MVP prototype takes about 3 months.
Core software architecture, initial UI/UX, working prototype in 3 months
Software architecture, UI/UX, customized software development, manual and automated testing, cloud deployment
Comprehensive software architecture and documentation, UI/UX design layouts, UI kit, clickable prototypes, cloud deployment, continuous integration, as well as automated monitoring and notifications.
Prices vary based on project scope, complexity, timeline and requirements. Hourly rates range from $35 to $75 depending on role and seniority. Contact us for a personalized estimate.
Need extra hands on your software project? Our developers can jump in at any stage - from architecture to auditing - and integrate seamlessly with your team to fill any technical gaps.
Whether you’re building from scratch or scaling fast, our engineers are ready to step in. You stay in control, and we handle the code.
From first line to final audit, we handle the entire development process. We will deliver secure, production-ready software, while you can focus on your business.
| Model | Best for | Team setup | Budget range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Staff Augmentation | Existing teams needing extra engineers at any project stage | 1-2 weeks | From $5,000/month |
| Dedicated Team Popular | Long-term projects requiring full ownership and control | 2-4 weeks | From $15,000/month |
| Project Outsourcing | Full-cycle development from idea to production launch | 1-2 weeks | $10,000-$80,000+ |
Our engineers work with 187+ technologies across blockchain, backend, frontend, mobile and DevOps - chosen for production reliability and performance.
Our engineers work with 187+ technologies across 10 categories: Frameworks, AI, Blockchains, DevOps, Clouds, Databases, Brokers, Tests, Programming, UI/UX.
Our company starts and assembles an entire project specialists with the perfect blend of skills and experience to start the work.
We’ll design, build and launch your MVP, ensuring it meets the core requirements of your software solution.
We’ll create a complete software solution that is custom-made to meet your exact specifications.
Our company will be right there with you, keeping your software solution running smoothly, fixing issues and rolling out updates.
Backend architecture in 2026 covering monolith versus microservices patterns, REST and GraphQL API design, data layer scaling and how to choose the right backend stack for your product.
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Use Supabase or Firebase for CRUD MVPs, internal tools, prototypes and apps where the data model is generic. Build custom when you need complex business logic, regulated data residency, real-time scale, custom unit economics or integration with systems that BaaS does not cover.
Pharos has built MVPs on Supabase and migrated to custom only after the platform hit a real wall - do not migrate prematurely.
Defaults: Node.js or Python (FastAPI / Django) for general-purpose APIs and integration-heavy work; Go for high-throughput services and infrastructure tooling; Java/Spring or Elixir/Phoenix for high-concurrency low-latency systems; Rust where memory safety and predictable latency matter most. The right choice depends on your team skills, hiring market and existing infrastructure - we will recommend a different stack if your team is already strong in something else.
REST for public APIs, third-party integrations and simple service-to-service. GraphQL when multiple clients (web, mobile, partner) need flexible projections of the same data - federation lets multiple teams own subgraphs.
gRPC for internal service-to-service when latency and contract enforcement matter. Most Pharos backends use REST for the public surface and gRPC or events between internal services.
API MVP 6-10 weeks: 2 weeks discovery and data model, 4-6 weeks build with integration tests in CI, 1-2 weeks production hardening (monitoring, alerting, runbooks). Production backend with full integration suite 3-8 months.
Migrations and rewrites typically run 6-12 months including parallel-run validation and traffic cutover.
Discovery includes a load model (peak QPS, p50/p99 latency targets, data growth) tied to a load test harness that runs in CI on critical paths. We measure before optimizing - most performance problems are wrong queries and missing indexes, not language or framework choice.
When we do scale out, we prefer horizontal scaling on stateless services + careful database partitioning over premature microservices.
Yes, when they fit. Our default for new projects is a modular monolith with clear bounded contexts and a clean public API per module.
We split into services when one of three things happens: independent scaling needs, independent deployment needs across teams or a clear bounded context that benefits from a different runtime. We do not recommend microservices for teams under 10 engineers - the operational tax outweighs the benefits.
Structured logging (JSON), distributed traces (OpenTelemetry → Tempo / Honeycomb / Datadog), metrics (Prometheus) and SLO dashboards on the critical paths. Every request carries a trace ID surfaced in logs and error reports. Critical alerts page on-call via PagerDuty or OpsGenie. Runbooks live next to the alerts so the on-call engineer has the fix steps in the same place as the alarm.
Yes. Common patterns: strangler-fig (extract services from a monolith one bounded context at a time with a routing layer), parallel-run cutover (new and old backend serve the same traffic for a validation window) and behind-the-flag rewrites (new code path enabled for 1% of traffic, ramped to 100% on validation).
We never recommend big-bang rewrites on systems that are working - too risky.
We decline CRUD MVPs that should ship on Supabase, microservice splits for small teams, backend rewrites without a measured production problem and Zapier-glue work dressed up as a backend. Strongest fit: high-throughput systems, regulated data, complex business logic, multi-tenant SaaS, real-time pipelines, event-driven architectures.
Published record
Technical articles, comparison guides and methodology deep-dives we write from our own delivery experience.
Back-end quality in 2026 is measurable: DORA metrics, typed contracts, SLO-driven reliability and supply chain hygiene. Pharos Production builds these baselines into every back-end engagement, so the code you inherit at handover reads like a platform product, not a sprint backlog.
Achieve them with minimized risk through our bespoke innovation capabilities
Contact us today to discuss your project. We’re ready to review your request promptly and guide you on the best next steps for collaboration
Same dayWe’re committed to keeping your information confidential, so we’ll sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement
1 dayAfter we chat about your goals and needs, we’ll craft a comprehensive proposal detailing the project scope, team, timeline and budget
3-5 daysLet’s connect on Google Meet to go through the proposal and confirm all the details together!
1-2 daysAs soon as the contract is signed, our dedicated team will jump into action on your project!
Same dayHeadquarters in Las Vegas, Nevada. Engineering office in Kyiv, Ukraine.
We also work with clients through dedicated local teams in Las Vegas, New York and San Francisco.
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