Forty years of Apple and FileMaker work, run quietly from Cumbria.

Heritage

From the original Mac onwards.

Coates IT has been working with Apple platforms since the original Macintosh, and with FileMaker for as long as it has carried that name. Over four decades the tools have changed; the discipline behind them has not.

We came to FileMaker the long way round — through years of Apple-native software, custom database work, and the dawn of network-based business systems. That history is the reason our work feels older than its file dates: we've watched the patterns repeat, and we know which ones hold up.

The way we work

Most of our projects come through referral. Most of our clients have been with us for a decade or more. We don't subcontract development, we don't pass support tickets to a third party, and we don't dress up small jobs as enterprise programmes.

• One small team, all in-house, no hand-offs.
• Plain-English communication, in writing and on the phone.
• Fixed scopes where it makes sense, transparent time-and-materials where it doesn't.
• Code, schemas and credentials always belong to the client.

Sister operations

The hosting and infrastructure side of the business operates as FM Hosting UK — running FileMaker, Mac, WordPress and bare-metal servers from UK datacentres, with our own in-house tooling for hardening and backup. The same engineers, a different door.

What we believe

Software earns its keep over years, not sprints. Honesty is faster than hedging. Apple kit, well-managed FileMaker, and a person who answers the phone will out-perform a great deal of fashionable architecture. We've yet to see anything change those rules.