Elemento

Why Elemento?

You may work by yourself, or in a large organisation. You may use software yourself, or sell products to others.

Whatever you do, Elemento can help you create the software you or your customers need.

In less time and for less money than you ever thought possible.

Small businesses

Your business is unique, but you're probably trying to bend standard software to fit. Elemento can help you build the systems that fit your business perfectly.

Or maybe you want to provide a specialised service online, but you don't think you could afford it. Elemento may bring it within reach.

Charities

Your budgets are tight, but that just means you need to do even more with less.

Elemento may be able to help your hard-pressed staff squeeze a bit more out of each day.

IT departments

Elemento can reduce cost, time-to-market and risks in your next development project. Our consultants can give you a flying start and make sure your developers are completely up to speed to carry it forward.

Even if you have to stick with corporate standards, a prototype created with Elemento could make sure you build exactly what your users need and act as a reference for testing.

Accountants

Earn extra revenue and make your clients love you by building custom software to make their businesses run more efficiently.

We can train your own staff to build software with Elemento.

If you work with Xero, we are planning a range of Elemento building blocks that connect to the Xero API.

Web designers

When your clients need something more than a static site, Elemento is right there to bridge the gap.

And it's far quicker and easier than other web development technologies.

Give it a try - and if you want a friendly guide during the work, one of our consultants will be happy to work with you.

Software product suppliers

You're probably working hard to differentiate your product from others in your market.

How about a killer USP? Every customer can customise their instance of your application to suit their business precisely - or get it done for them at low cost.

We can work with you to make that possible, by creating Elemento building blocks that work with your API.

Or maybe you're launching a new application or looking to refresh an existing one - get it to market in a fraction of the time with Elemento.

Using Elemento

We want to empower everyone to create their own software,
using a simple but powerful tools designed for people, not programmers.

Ever thought you could build your own software?

Programming is hard.

It takes years to learn.

I'm no good at anything like that.

Most programming languages are designed by techies, for techies. But what if it didn't have to be like that? What if you could build your own software - apps, websites, tools for your work - or just a catalogue for your teapot collection?

Elemento lets you do that. If you can use a word processor or set up a spreadsheet, you can get started in a few minutes, make something useful in a few hours, and produce your first serious app in a few days.

You still need to think about what you want to achieve and decide how to get there. But that's the same with anything worthwhile: writing an essay, building a piece of furniture, cooking a meal, planning an event. If you can do something like that, you can create software with Elemento.

How Elemento works

With Elemento there is no need to learn a weird coding language.

You just need to define simple facts about:

• the things your system deals with - customers, orders, bookings, etc
• the actions people can do with those things
• what screen views you want to see for each of the things
• the business rules of your system - expressed as simple formulas, like in a spreadsheet

No magic, no secrets

Elemento is open source, free to use and actually quite simple inside.

The facts you define get turned into straightforward code that will run by itself, and that any JavaScript programmer can understand and maintain directly.

So you're not locked in, and even if all of our people are abducted by aliens, you will still be able to use your Elemento software.

Learn Elemento

We are developing a range of training courses to help you get up to speed with Elemento quickly and easily. The first free tutorials are available on the Elemento Online site now.

Keep in touch to find out when more are released.

A Helping Hand

Elemento is simple to learn and use yourself if you want to. But you may want some guidance to get started on a project. Perhaps you and your staff may have limited time to spare. Or you may just feel better with someone around to say "Yes, that's the right way to do it".

That's where our friendly, flexible and straightforward consultancy service comes in.

No signing up for expensive contracts - if you just need half an hour to ask some questions, we can do that.

If you want a week to start off a large piece of work, we can do that too. But we would probably advise you to go for a couple of days first, and then see how much more you need.

It's all about getting you the right help at the right time, not installing people in expensive suits on your furniture for the long term.

We don't take over and do the work - we will just train and guide you or your staff. The aim is to enable your people and give them control, not make them dependent on outsiders whose work they don't understand.

But if doing things in-house really isn't for you, we can help you select a professional software developer to build your system with Elemento. You will still benefit from much faster development times and lower costs.

And while our rates reflect the professional knowledge and skill we will bring to you, you may find them surprisingly reasonable compared to the big consultancy firms.

To arrange a free 30-minute initial discussion, please contact us.

About Elemento

Elemento is being developed by Ashridge Technologies.

We've been involved in dozens of software projects, large and small, over the last 30 years. And throughout all of them, one question keeps turning up:

Why does it take so long - and cost so much - to turn a simple idea in someone's head into working software?

We believe there are two main reasons:

Programming languages reflect the way computers work, not the way people think about things

Programmers live in a different world to the people who use the software

In the last few years, many products have appeared that aim to make programming simpler for people who are not professionals. They are usually called Low Code or No Code tools.

They do make programming easier, but they also come with some or all of the following problems:

• They are aimed at big companies
• They only let you build systems to use inside the company
• They are expensive
• They lock in your program and data to one supplier's platform
• You have to pay forever to keep your software running
• You have to hope the supplier stays in business
• And many of them aren't much easier than a normal programming language

So we are going to change that with Elemento:

• Elemento is for anyone - individual, small business, charity - or a big corporate
• You can build public websites or internal systems, from accounting to games
• Elemento itself is free. It can run your software on standard hosting services like Google Cloud for a low (or even no) cost
• You control your software and data, and you can do what you like with them
• You have no initial or ongoing costs apart from the hosting
• Elemento is open source, so you can carry on using it permanently even if our company goes away
• And we have thought very hard about making Elemento the easiest low code tool to learn and use

We are going to enable everyone in the world to create the software they need for business, education or use at home, at the lowest possible cost.

We will also provide paid training and consultancy services for those who have the budget and want to save some time, but we expect most people will get started entirely for free.

What will you create with Elemento?