DEV.co
St. Petersburg, FL · Custom Software + AI

Custom software for St. Petersburg — built the AI-native way.

We pair senior engineers with an AI-accelerated delivery model to design, build, and ship custom software far faster than a traditional shop — without the fragile, unreviewed code that gives AI a bad name.

Senior-only engineering · AI-accelerated delivery · you own 100% of the code

AI changed the economics of custom software. We rebuilt our process around it.

St. Petersburg anchors the western half of Tampa Bay — home to deep financial-services and wealth-management employers (Raymond James, Franklin Templeton), growing healthcare networks, and a fast-growing B2B SaaS scene around downtown's Innovation District. Senior hires are six figures, months out, and picked over by Tampa Bay employers and the venture-backed challengers around them. AI changes the math, but only when senior people own the parts AI gets wrong.

AI is genuinely good at the repetitive 70% of software work: scaffolding, boilerplate, CRUD, first-draft UI, test stubs, glue code. It is dangerously unreliable at the other 30%: architecture, security, edge cases, and knowing when its own output is wrong. Teams that ship raw AI code learn this in production.

We build for St. Petersburg operators — wealth-management and financial-services tools, fintech and payments platforms scaling toward compliance, provider-side healthcare tools, B2B SaaS shipping into mid-market buyers, and modernization of decades-old enterprise stacks. Our model: AI handles scaffolding and the repetitive 70%; a senior engineer owns architecture, security review, and signs off on every change.

Show, don't tell

AI writes the first draft. A senior engineer signs off.

Every change runs through review for security, tests, and architecture before it ships — that review is the product.

delivery.tstypescript
const draft = await ai.generate(spec)          // minutes, not daysreview(draft, { security: true, tests: true, architecture: true })// ✗ rejected: PAN logged in plaintext on an error path → tokenized + scrubbed + log-content test// ✓ merged: audit-logged authentication event with correlation id, idempotency key on payment webhook
Every change
AI velocity + human judgment
tests + security review built in
you own 100% of the result

On a St. Petersburg fintech, wealth-management, or healthcare build, the failure modes are cardholder data in logs, missing auth audit trails, and non-idempotent payment webhooks. Senior review catches them before a QSA, examiner, or HIPAA review does.

What we build for St. Petersburg companies.

Fintech

Fintech & payments platforms

Customer-facing apps, ledgers, and risk pipelines for regulated, data-heavy products.

Product

SaaS platforms

Multi-tenant products with auth, billing, and dashboards — MVP to scale.

Healthcare

Healthcare & HIPAA-ready apps

Patient-facing portals, clinician tools, and care-coordination platforms built to HIPAA from day one.

Modernize

Modernization

Move legacy systems onto a modern, maintainable stack — incrementally, no big-bang.

AI

AI applications

Copilots, RAG, search, and agents grounded in your data, with guardrails and evals.

Internal

Internal tools & copilots

Operations tooling that replaces the spreadsheet-and-tribal-knowledge workflow.

Senior, on-shore, AI-accelerated

A senior team that moves at AI speed.

You work with senior engineers who own architecture and quality — not a junior pool with raw AI output bolted on. We communicate in Eastern Time and integrate with your tools and cadence.

St. Pete's senior engineering pool is part of the Tampa Bay-wide pool — three-to-six months to hire and quietly poached by remote coastal roles. An AI-native team gets you shipping this week, flexes monthly, and doesn't need a downtown St. Pete office.

Talk to an engineer

Traditional St. Petersburg dev shop vs. AI-native.

Traditional AgencyDEV.co (AI-native)
Time to working softwareMonthsDays to weeks
CostFull senior rates, all hoursLower — AI removes the rote work
Code qualityGood (if senior)Same bar — every change reviewed
AI riskContained by senior review + tests
You own the codeUsuallyAlways — full repo on day one
Scales with youSlow to staff upFlex up or down monthly
2–3×
faster than traditional development
1 wk
to a working prototype
100%
code ownership at handoff
30 days
post-launch support included

Common questions from St. Petersburg teams.

Do you work with St. Petersburg companies?
Yes — we serve St. Petersburg, Tampa, and Orlando companies with senior, on-shore engineers in Eastern Time. Most collaboration is remote-first, with on-site available for kickoffs and key milestones.
Do you build for regulated finance, wealth management, and HIPAA-scoped healthcare?
Yes. We architect with PCI scope, SOC 2, and HIPAA in mind from day one — tokenization, isolated data flows, access logging, audit trails — and we've shipped into SOC 2-audited and BAA-bound environments. We don't certify your stack; we build code your auditor can review.
Is AI-built software production-ready?
Yes — when a senior engineer reviews every output, adds tests, and hardens it. The horror stories come from shipping raw AI code unsupervised. We don't, and we support what we ship.
Will we own the code?
100%, from day one. We deliver to a repository you control — no proprietary platform, no lock-in.
How fast can we start?
Usually within days. A short scoping call defines the build, the timeline, and a fixed quote.
Can you work with our existing team?
Yes — we augment in-house teams, review their work, and set standards, or run the build end to end. We flex to how you work.

Let's build it — St. Petersburg.

Tell us what you're trying to ship. We'll give you an honest recommendation, a timeline, and a fixed quote — and tell you if AI-native is the right fit or not.