About Recommence

Why WhatsApp

In much of the world, WhatsApp is where work actually happens. Staff are dispatched there, customers ask their questions there, and shifts are confirmed there. Businesses across Africa, Latin America and South and Southeast Asia run real operations on it every day.

We build for the way those businesses already work, rather than asking them to change how they work to suit the software. That applies to our client work and to our own products.

What we do

Three things: WhatsApp Business API integration, custom software development in Elixir and Phoenix, and long-term support for systems that need to keep running. Most clients start with one and grow into the others.

We also run Veesva and Humming, which means we carry a pager for our own software and estimate other people's projects accordingly.

How we work

• We share the risk. Work runs in stages with a usable deliverable at each boundary, so you can stop or redirect without writing off what came before.
• We say what we think. If we believe an integration is the wrong approach, or a system should be repaired rather than rebuilt, you will hear it before you have paid for the alternative.
• We write things down. Runbooks, deployment steps and dependency maps are deliverables, not favours. That holds even when they make us replaceable.

Where we work

We are based in Johannesburg and work remotely with clients across South Africa and the wider Global South. Most of our work is delivered without anyone getting on a plane, which keeps engagements affordable and lets us work with teams whose nearest specialist agency is several countries away.

What we will not do

We do not take work we cannot support, and we do not quote confidently on something we have not understood. If a project needs a team we do not have, we will say so rather than learn on your budget.