Edinburgh · City of Edinburgh
Software Development for Edinburgh Businesses
We do not have an office in Edinburgh. Fugen Services is registered in Glasgow, at 3/2, 4 Buccleuch Street, G3 6SL, about fifty miles west. In practice that distance barely counts: Queen Street to Waverley is roughly fifty minutes with four trains an hour, and the M8 takes an hour off peak. A morning workshop in the Exchange district or at Edinburgh Park, and we are home the same afternoon, with no hotel and nothing added to your invoice for travel. We build web platforms, custom software, mobile apps, AI tools, eCommerce and point-of-sale systems for firms in the capital, from asset managers in the New Town to BioQuarter spin-outs and Leith hospitality operators.
Working with Edinburgh businesses
Edinburgh's economy is concentrated in a way few UK cities match. Asset management and insurance sit in the New Town and around Charlotte Square, and in the Exchange district off Lothian Road, with Baillie Gifford, Aberdeen Group and Scottish Widows among the names that define the sector locally. Edinburgh Park at South Gyle holds the larger office campuses. Fintech clusters through FinTech Scotland, CodeBase on Lady Lawson Street and the Techscaler network, while consumer technology and games are represented by Skyscanner, FanDuel and Rockstar North. Life sciences run out of the BioQuarter at Little France beside the Royal Infirmary, with the Roslin Institute further out in Midlothian. The University of Edinburgh's Bayes Centre and Edinburgh Futures Institute pull data science and AI research into commercial reach, and Heriot-Watt at Riccarton adds engineering. Layered over all of it are Scottish Government at Holyrood, a substantial legal sector, and a tourism and festivals economy that reshapes the city every August.
Why Edinburgh businesses work with us
Edinburgh is the one city outside Glasgow where the distance genuinely does not matter. Fifty miles, four trains an hour, and a road journey shorter than many people's commute within London. So Edinburgh clients get most of what our Glasgow clients get: in-person discovery, workshops in your own boardroom, someone in the room on the day a difficult decision needs making, without an overnight stay or a travel line on the invoice. What we will not claim is a presence in the capital, because there isn't one. Beyond logistics, we work under the same legal system, the same Companies House, the same UK GDPR regime and the same public holidays, which removes a category of friction that appears the moment a supplier sits outside Scotland or outside the UK entirely.
How we work at this distance
We start with discovery in person, at your office in the New Town, the Exchange, Quartermile or Edinburgh Park, because the fifty-minute train makes that easy and video calls lose things. Out of that comes a written scope stating what gets built and what does not, and a price against it. Delivery runs in two-week blocks, each ending with working software you can use rather than a progress update. You hold the repository from the first commit and every account is in your name. We come back over for reviews and handovers at the points that matter, and stay on video for the routine weeks, which keeps the cost in the build rather than in travel.
The Edinburgh market, honestly
Edinburgh is an expensive place to hire developers, and the reason is competition rather than scarcity. Skyscanner, FanDuel, Rockstar North, Amazon's local operation and the banks' engineering teams all recruit from the same pool, so salary expectations run above the Scottish average and above Glasgow for comparable roles. Office costs are the highest in Scotland, and August compresses everything from meeting rooms to hotel rates. Supply is genuinely strong, with the University of Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt, Napier and Queen Margaret all local, and the Bayes Centre producing data science graduates. The practical point is that the fifty-minute train works both ways: Edinburgh firms can draw on Glasgow capacity, ours included, at a different cost base.
What Edinburgh industries actually need built
Not a list of services — the specific gap we most often find in each of these sectors here.
Asset management and financial services
The gap is almost never the core platform. It is client reporting, onboarding workflows, data feeds between systems, and internal tools that currently live in Excel with one person who understands them. That work needs permissions, audit trails and retention rules designed in from the start, not added after a review.
Fintech and payments
Early-stage fintechs around CodeBase and Techscaler need to move fast without building something a due diligence process will reject. That usually means a properly structured web application, real test coverage, sensible key management, and an architecture someone else can pick up when the team grows past two engineers.
Life sciences and health research
BioQuarter companies and research groups accumulate sample, trial and instrument data across incompatible tools. The useful build is a web application that captures it once, with role-based access, defensible data handling under UK GDPR, and exports that satisfy collaborators. We build to your governance approvals, not around them.
Tourism, festivals and hospitality
Venues, tour operators and restaurants live or die on a few weeks of the year. They need booking, capacity and ticketing that hold up under August load, integrate with the channels guests actually use, and can be changed safely in the quiet months. Our point-of-sale line covers the restaurant and cafe side.
Games and consumer technology
Studios and consumer apps need supporting infrastructure more than they need another engine: analytics pipelines, live-ops dashboards, account systems, storefront and support tooling. Often the internal team is deep on the product and short on the web platform around it, which is the part we take on.
What we build for Edinburgh clients
Every service below is available to Edinburgh and City of Edinburgh businesses.
Software Engineering
AI & Automation
Design & Experience
Growth & Marketing
Cloud & Infrastructure
Dedicated Teams
Edinburgh questions
Including whether we actually have an office here — we do not, and we would rather say so.
No. Our only registered address is in Glasgow, at 3/2, 4 Buccleuch Street, G3 6SL. Edinburgh clients are served from there, with travel for meetings whenever it makes sense. We would rather say that plainly than list a serviced address on Princes Street and hope nobody checks Companies House. The fifty miles between the cities makes it a non-issue in practice.
The same day, usually within a couple of hours of asking. Queen Street to Waverley runs about fifty minutes with four trains an hour, and driving the M8 takes roughly an hour outside peak. That means a full morning workshop at your office and both parties back at their desks by mid-afternoon. We do not add travel costs to Edinburgh invoices.
We build to the requirements your risk and compliance functions set: audit trails, access control, data retention under UK GDPR, security review before release, and documented change management. Much of the work is integration and internal tooling around systems that already exist. We do not give regulatory advice and will not interpret FCA rules for you. That stays with your own people.
Yes, and it is worth planning for. During the festivals, travel and accommodation in the city become difficult and expensive, so we front-load in-person sessions into June and July. For hospitality, venue and ticketing clients, we also treat late July as a code freeze: nobody should be deploying changes to a booking system in the week the Fringe opens.
A marketing website is £4,500–£9,000 and a content-managed website £9,000–£25,000. Web applications start from £12,000, mobile apps from £15,000, and cross-platform apps are £22,000–£45,000. SEO audits start from £1,200 with ongoing programmes at £800–£2,500 per month. Every figure is a starting range, firmed up after discovery against a written scope.
That is what the feasibility assessment is for, at £3,000–£6,000. It establishes whether your data supports the idea before anyone builds anything, and it sometimes concludes that it does not. If the case holds, an AI chatbot starts from £6,000, and retrieval over your own documents is usually a better first project than a general-purpose assistant.
Yes, and we scope it differently. Grant-funded and pre-revenue companies should not be spending £40,000 on a first build. We would rather start with one narrow piece that proves the technical approach, then extend it as funding lands. If a research group already has working code, sometimes the right job is making it deployable rather than rewriting it.
Also serving
Other UK cities
Building something in Edinburgh?
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.
Get in touch