Aberdeen · North East Scotland
Software Development in Aberdeen
Aberdeen's software requirements do not look like anywhere else in Scotland. The questions that come from Dyce, Altens, Westhill and Prime Four at Kingswells are about offshore data, crew rotations, inspection records, tender documents and equipment tracked across vessels and yards. Fugen Services builds web platforms, custom software, mobile apps, integrations and AI tooling for that kind of work, alongside the ordinary things: eCommerce, WordPress, SEO and point-of-sale for the retail and hospitality side of the city. We are registered in Glasgow at 3/2, 4 Buccleuch Street, around two and a half hours from Aberdeen by train, and we travel up when a project genuinely needs us in the room.
Working with Aberdeen businesses
The North East economy still turns on energy, but the shape of it is changing. Oil and gas operators and their supply chain remain the largest employers, while the Energy Transition Zone beside the new South Harbour at Nigg Bay is being built out for floating offshore wind, hydrogen and carbon capture. The Aberdeen Hydrogen Hub, a joint venture with bp, sits behind the city's hydrogen bus and refuse fleets. Subsea engineering clusters around Westhill, with the National Subsea Centre run by Robert Gordon University and the Net Zero Technology Centre. Aberdeen International Airport at Dyce handles offshore crew changes by helicopter as well as scheduled flights. Beyond the city, Peterhead and Fraserburgh land some of Europe's largest fish catches, Aberdeenshire beef and whisky supply chains run through the Thainstone mart at Inverurie, and the University of Aberdeen, RGU and the ONE Tech Hub on Schoolhill supply graduates and start-ups.
Why Aberdeen businesses work with us
Aberdeen's engineering employers pay well for technical people, and software developers here compete with the energy supply chain for the same graduates. That makes an in-house team slow to build and awkwardly cyclical, exactly the wrong shape for a business whose capital plans move with the oil price and ScotWind timetables. We give you delivery capacity you can turn up for a project and down afterwards, without carrying permanent headcount through a quiet quarter. Being in Glasgow rather than Aberdeen also means we are not bidding against your own recruitment. Everything is contracted through a UK company, invoiced in sterling and covered by UK GDPR, which matters when a client's procurement team sends a supply chain questionnaire.
How we work at this distance
Aberdeen to Glasgow is a straightforward rail journey via Dundee, and there are flights between the two airports, so we come up for discovery sessions, site visits and milestone reviews. Between those, delivery is remote and predictable: a weekly call, a fortnightly working build, and a backlog you can see at any time. For offshore-facing projects we usually ask for one early visit to an office in Altens, Bridge of Don or Westhill, because watching someone fill in a paper permit or a spreadsheet tells us more than any specification document. We have no Aberdeen office and will not pretend otherwise.
The Aberdeen market, honestly
Aberdeen has had one of Scotland's tighter markets for technical staff for decades, and while the oil and gas contraction has loosened parts of it, experienced software people remain expensive and are often pulled back into energy contracting on day rates. Office costs in the centre have come down from their peak, which has helped smaller firms take space around Marischal Square and Union Street, but salary competition has not gone away. Our dedicated developer rate is £3,200–£6,500 per developer per month, and server management from £250 per month if you would rather not run infrastructure with an internal team of one.
What Aberdeen industries actually need built
Not a list of services — the specific gap we most often find in each of these sectors here.
Oil, gas and energy services
Operators and contractors need systems that survive poor connectivity: offline-capable mobile apps for inspections and permits that sync when a vessel or platform gets a link, competency and certificate expiry tracking for rotating crews, and integrations into existing maintenance and ERP systems rather than another isolated database nobody updates.
Subsea and marine engineering
Subsea firms around Westhill sit on survey, ROV and sensor data that is hard to search and harder to hand to a client. The work is usually pipelines and portals: ingest, tag and store large datasets, then give clients a controlled view with exports and audit trails instead of couriered hard drives.
Renewables, hydrogen and energy transition
Newer operations need the unglamorous plumbing built early: asset registers, maintenance scheduling for turbines and electrolysers, telemetry dashboards, and reporting that satisfies both investors and regulators. Teams here are often small and moving fast, so we build a first usable version rather than a two-year platform.
Food, drink and fishing
Processors in Peterhead, Fraserburgh and across Aberdeenshire need catch and batch traceability, grading and yield records, chilled logistics scheduling and export documentation. Retail and trade customers increasingly expect a portal for orders and product specifications, which is often the first web application these businesses commission.
Retail and hospitality
City centre and Union Street traders, along with cafés and takeaways serving offshore shift patterns, need tills that handle late trade, multi-site stock and card reconciliation. Our point-of-sale line covers retail, repairs, bakery, cafe and restaurant, fast food, grocery, fashion, electronics and wholesale.
What we build for Aberdeen clients
Every service below is available to Aberdeen and North East Scotland businesses.
Software Engineering
AI & Automation
Design & Experience
Growth & Marketing
Cloud & Infrastructure
Dedicated Teams
Aberdeen questions
Including whether we actually have an office here — we do not, and we would rather say so.
No. Our registered address is 3/2, 4 Buccleuch Street, Glasgow G3 6SL, and it is the only one we have. Aberdeen clients are served remotely, with travel up for kick-off workshops, site visits and milestone reviews. The train from Glasgow Queen Street takes around two and a half hours, so getting there for a full working day is routine rather than an expedition.
Yes, and it changes the design from the start. Offline-first mobile apps hold data locally, queue changes and sync when a link appears, with clear rules for what happens when two people edit the same record on different rotations. Photographs and forms are compressed and uploaded in the background. We test on deliberately poor connections rather than assuming office wifi.
Well enough to build it. In practice that means a register of people, tickets and expiry dates, from survival and medical through trade and site-specific, with alerts before someone becomes non-compliant, rotation-aware scheduling, and evidence a client auditor can inspect. We build to the standards your HSE and competence leads specify rather than inventing our own reading of them.
Usually yes, through whatever interface exists: APIs, database views, flat file exchange or middleware. We normally start read-only, prove the data matches, then add writes once your team trusts it. Where a vendor charges for API access or restricts it, we tell you early, because that cost belongs in the project budget rather than in a surprise invoice.
A marketing website is £4,500–£9,000 and a content-managed website £9,000–£25,000. A web application starts from £12,000. A mobile app starts from £15,000, and a cross-platform app is £22,000–£45,000. An AI chatbot starts from £6,000. Server management is from £250 per month, a dedicated developer £3,200–£6,500 per developer per month, and an SEO audit from £1,200.
We offer security audits of software and infrastructure, and we can fix what they turn up. What we will not do is claim certifications, for you or for us, that nobody has assessed. Realistically we review your application, hosting, access control, patching and backups, give you findings ranked by risk, and help you answer the questionnaire honestly rather than optimistically.
Yes, and it is usually the right call at that stage. An AI feasibility assessment is £3,000–£6,000 if the question is whether a model or automation is worth pursuing, and a first web application starts from £12,000. We would scope the smallest useful version, perhaps an asset register, scheduling and one dashboard, get it in use, then extend as contracts and funding land.
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Building something in Aberdeen?
Tell us the problem. We will tell you what would fix it, roughly what it costs, and whether we are the right people for it.
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