About the company
A studio, named plainly, doing one kind of work.
ZAAPTO LTD is a software studio in Basingstoke that builds business workflow automation. This page says what that means in practice, how the studio is arranged, and where the company can be checked on the public register.
The work
What the studio does, in one page.
One kind of work, described in the terms a business would use for it rather than in the terms a vendor would.
Most businesses of any age end up with a set of software they bought at different times for different reasons. A finance system, a system for jobs or orders, something for documents, something for email, and one or two spreadsheets that quietly hold the whole thing together. Each of those was chosen sensibly. The problem is rarely any one of them. The problem is the space between them, which nobody bought and nobody owns.
That space is where ZAAPTO works. It is filled in most companies by a person retyping a number, forwarding an email, exporting a file on a Friday, or remembering to check something because there is no other way to know. Work of that kind is invisible in every system report and completely visible to the person doing it.
Why the word studio
Studio is an accurate description of size and of how the work is arranged: a small practice taking on scoped pieces of work with a written specification, rather than an agency selling capacity or a vendor selling seats.
Why there is no product
There is no ZAAPTO application to sign up for, no free tier, and no platform in the middle of a client's systems. Automation that a business depends on should keep running without depending on whoever built it, and the surest way to arrange that is to build it in the client's own accounts and hand over everything needed to run it.
The corollary is that ZAAPTO is not a self serve tool and is not presented as one. If what a reader needs is a subscription product with a builder interface, that is a different kind of purchase and ZAAPTO is not it.
Where the name comes from
ZAAPTO is a coined word with no meaning behind it. It is set as one undivided unit, and the company has no association with, and makes no claim of any relationship to, any other business using a similar name. Anyone who arrived here looking for a different company is in the wrong place, and this paragraph exists so that the wrong place is obvious quickly.
How the work is priced
The first stage is a paid, fixed price discovery of one process, quoted before it starts. Everything after it is priced against the specification that discovery produces, and a change to the specification is priced and agreed in writing before it is made.
A specification the client owns outlasts whoever wrote it.
Fair questions
Things worth asking before you send work.
Answered as they would be answered on a call, without softening.
Structurally. The first stage is a paid, fixed price piece of discovery that ends with a written specification the client owns and can take to any other developer. If ZAAPTO turns out to be the wrong choice, the client keeps the most valuable part of the work and has spent a bounded amount to find out.
Everything after that is built in the client's own accounts, so there is no stage at which the client's ability to run their own automation depends on ZAAPTO staying involved.
The person who answers the enquiry email is the person who writes the specification and does the build. Where an engagement would need capability the studio does not have, that is said at the scope stage and the work is declined or referred rather than subcontracted quietly.
The company's officers are listed on the public register at Companies House and can be read there.
Access is requested per system, named, scoped to the work, and revocable by the client at any moment without needing anything from ZAAPTO. Client data stays in client owned systems. Where a piece of work requires ZAAPTO to process personal data on a client's behalf, that is done under a written data processing agreement and the roles are set out in the privacy notice.
Scope, price, timing, ownership, support and data protection, in a written contract signed by both parties. An enquiry, a conversation or an estimate given in an email is not a contract, and work begins when the engagement is signed.
How to check
Two minutes on the public register.
Search company number 16938315 at Companies House. The registered name, the company number and the SIC code printed on this site should match the register exactly. If anything on this site disagrees with the register, the register is correct and we would like to be told.
Send us the process that keeps going wrong.
Describe one process in an email. A short reply saying it is not worth automating costs nothing and is a normal outcome.
The address is read by the person who writes the specification. Every enquiry gets an answer inside two working days.