About Elevated Third
Elevated Third is a Denver-based Drupal agency that leans in and gets results. They live for results--digital strategy, websites, web applications, and digital customer experiences that make a big impact. They dive deep to understand your problem and customer. Their unalterable efforts to provide the richest service have what made us a pioneer in this field.
Services
Mobile App Development
Web Development
VR App Development
Enterprise App Modernization
Mobile App Design
App Marketing
Elevated Third Reviews
Write a ReviewTest automation suite that gives our team confidence to deploy on a Friday
Lachlan Burgess / Chief Digital Officer - Harbour Digital Pty Ltd
Verified
Oct 04, 2025
Oct 04, 2025
Project summary: Our property management portfolio had grown to a point where spreadsheets and disconnected tools were costing us both time and deals. We needed a single system of record.
The technical quality of the work is the easiest thing to praise, but what I want to highlight is the communication culture on this team. Every question got a same-day response. Every risk got flagged before it became an issue. When we needed to change direction mid-project — a business decision on our side — they absorbed the change professionally, requoted fairly, and kept momentum going. That flexibility is something you cannot assess in a proposal and it turned out to be one of the most valuable things about working with them.
PROS
Architectural decisions that will serve us for years rather than just solving the immediate problem, knowledge transfer that left our team genuinely capable, no scope creep at all
CONS
Time zone difference required some adjustment to our internal communication habits but the team managed the overlap window efficiently and it never affected momentum
Project TypeQuality Assurance & Testing
IndustryReal Estate
Project Cost$150,000 to $499,999
DurationApr 2025 – Dec 2025
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
I lead technology at Harbour Digital Pty Ltd, a mid-sized organisation in the Real Estate sector headquartered in Sydney, Australia. My remit as Chief Digital Officer covers everything from infrastructure to product development. We had reached a point where our internal engineering capacity was not sufficient to execute our roadmap without an experienced external partner.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Our Real Estate regulatory environment had changed and the compliance timeline was non-negotiable. We needed to rebuild specific components of our system to meet the new requirements and our internal team was already fully committed to the core product roadmap. Bringing in a specialist Quality Assurance & Testing partner was the only realistic path.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The full Quality Assurance & Testing lifecycle from discovery through to production deployment and hypercare support. This included requirements workshops, solution architecture, sprint-based development, QA and automated testing, deployment to our cloud environment, and a structured handover with documentation. They also provided a brief post-launch period of dedicated support which was genuinely useful.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
Honestly, the quality of the questions they asked during the briefing process set them apart. Most vendors listen to the brief and come back with a solution to exactly what you described. This team came back with a solution to what we actually needed, which turned out to be somewhat different. That kind of consultative instinct is what we were looking for.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
The requirements understanding was solid from early on, aided by the fact that they had prior experience in the Real Estate sector and did not need us to explain domain context that a less experienced team would have required. That background knowledge shortened the discovery phase meaningfully and reduced the volume of clarification questions during sprints.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Outstanding. I have worked with agencies that communicate beautifully during the sales process and go quiet during delivery. This was the opposite — structured, consistent, and genuinely informative throughout. Problems were surfaced early with proposed solutions rather than just problem statements, which made the inevitable mid-project decisions much easier to make.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Yes. I will note that the original timeline was aggressive and I had privately expected a slip. They managed to hold it by making smart sequencing decisions early on that I only fully understood in retrospect. The budget discipline was equally good — we received a single change request for scope we had introduced ourselves and it was priced fairly.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
The most direct measure is that the problem we hired them to solve no longer exists. Beyond that, the new Quality Assurance & Testing platform has reduced our operational overhead measurably, our team spends less time managing incidents and more time on product development, and we have been able to onboard two new enterprise clients who had previously cited our technical limitations as a barrier.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The post-launch behaviour. Some agencies disappear the moment the final invoice is paid. This team maintained the same level of responsiveness during the hypercare period as during development, handed over thorough documentation without being asked twice, and checked in proactively a month after go-live to review performance metrics with us. That last part was entirely unprompted.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Yes. The referral I would give comes with context: they are not the cheapest option and they are not the fastest to schedule. If you are optimising purely on price or looking for someone to start tomorrow, there are other choices. If you want the work done properly and a partner you can trust with a complex, high-stakes Quality Assurance & Testing engagement, this team is the answer.
Test automation suite that gives our team confidence to deploy on a Friday
Jordan Mills / Director of Operations - Cascade Manufacturing
Verified
Sep 04, 2025
Sep 04, 2025
Project summary: Our existing platform had grown organically over several years and the accumulated technical debt was beginning to affect both performance and our ability to ship new features.
Our previous agency had given us a platform that worked well enough to demo and fell apart under real load. This team came in, diagnosed the root causes accurately, and rebuilt the critical components without disrupting the live service. The performance improvements were immediate and measurable — page load times dropped by 60 percent, error rates dropped to near zero, and our support team has far fewer incidents to deal with. The contrast with our previous experience could not have been sharper.
PROS
Business-aware approach to every technical decision, strong project governance, fast turnaround on feedback, zero drama during a genuinely complex engagement
CONS
The initial project brief document they required was more detailed than we were used to providing, but in hindsight that rigour was part of why the project ran so smoothly
Project TypeQuality Assurance & Testing
IndustryConstruction
Project Cost$500,000+
DurationJan 2025 – Apr 2025
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Cascade Manufacturing operates across the Construction sector with offices in Seattle, USA. In my capacity as Director of Operations I oversee both the strategic and operational technology agenda. We are a growth-stage business that needed a development partner capable of scaling with us rather than constraining us.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
The immediate trigger was a performance failure during our peak trading period that cost us measurably in both revenue and client trust. The root cause was architectural and our internal team did not have the Quality Assurance & Testing expertise to address it properly. We needed specialists.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The core engagement was Quality Assurance & Testing but expanded to include technical consultancy during the discovery phase, which helped us refine the requirements significantly before development began. They also took responsibility for coordinating with our third-party data providers, which removed a significant coordination burden from our internal team.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
We evaluated four vendors in total. Two were eliminated after the technical assessment stage because their proposed architectures showed a surface-level understanding of what we needed. This team's proposal demonstrated genuine depth in Quality Assurance & Testing and specific knowledge of the Construction sector that the others could not match. The reference calls confirmed a consistent pattern of delivery.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Better than we did at the start, which sounds like an exaggeration but is genuinely accurate. The discovery workshop they ran surfaced assumptions we had not examined and contradictions in our requirements that would have caused real problems mid-development. The functional specification they produced was the clearest articulation of our product that we had seen written down.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Outstanding. I have worked with agencies that communicate beautifully during the sales process and go quiet during delivery. This was the opposite — structured, consistent, and genuinely informative throughout. Problems were surfaced early with proposed solutions rather than just problem statements, which made the inevitable mid-project decisions much easier to make.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Yes. I will note that the original timeline was aggressive and I had privately expected a slip. They managed to hold it by making smart sequencing decisions early on that I only fully understood in retrospect. The budget discipline was equally good — we received a single change request for scope we had introduced ourselves and it was priced fairly.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
The ROI case we presented to our board assumed a payback period of eighteen months. Based on current trajectory we will hit that in under a year. The efficiency gains in our Construction operations have been more significant than the model projected, partly because the quality of the data coming out of the new system is enabling decisions we could not make before.
What did you like most about working with this company?
Their ability to hold the business objective in mind alongside the technical task. I have worked with technically excellent agencies who lost the thread of what we were actually trying to achieve. This team never did. Every architectural decision, every trade-off conversation, every prioritisation discussion was anchored to the outcome we had agreed at the start.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
I recommend them to anyone who asks and occasionally to people who do not. The combination of Quality Assurance & Testing expertise, Construction domain knowledge, and delivery discipline is genuinely difficult to find. We found it here and we intend to keep it.
Sales pipeline visibility we had wanted for years, delivered in twelve weeks
Hannah Richter / Chief Innovation Officer - Rhein Digital AG
Verified
May 06, 2025
May 06, 2025
Project summary: The project had both a hard delivery date tied to a board commitment and a scope that our previous agency had told us was not achievable. We needed someone to prove otherwise.
The thing I appreciate most in retrospect is that they were honest when something was harder than expected. Twice during the project the team came to us proactively to say that a particular component needed more time to do properly and explained why cutting corners would create problems later. We gave them the time. Both decisions were correct. The resulting product is solid and we have had none of the post-launch instability that plagued our last two technology projects.
PROS
Collaborative working style that made them feel like an extension of our team, excellent written communication for our async timezone relationship, clean and readable codebase
CONS
The volume of quality documentation they produced was genuinely impressive but also meant our team needed dedicated time to review it properly — a minor process point, not a complaint
Project TypeCRM Development
IndustryGaming & Gambling
Project Cost$500,000+
DurationMay 2025 – Feb 2026
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Rhein Digital AG is a Gaming & Gambling business based in Frankfurt, Germany. As Chief Innovation Officer I am responsible for all technology investment decisions, vendor selection, and ensuring our digital capabilities match our growth ambitions. We operate in a competitive market where the quality of our software directly affects our ability to win and retain clients.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Our existing CRM Development capability had accumulated years of technical debt that was slowing every new feature to a crawl. Incident frequency was rising, developer confidence was falling, and we knew a rebuild was overdue. We needed a partner with the depth to do it properly rather than apply another layer of patches.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The full CRM Development lifecycle from discovery through to production deployment and hypercare support. This included requirements workshops, solution architecture, sprint-based development, QA and automated testing, deployment to our cloud environment, and a structured handover with documentation. They also provided a brief post-launch period of dedicated support which was genuinely useful.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
Price was a factor but not the deciding one. They were mid-range in our evaluation. What tipped it was the combination of their technical depth in CRM Development, the seniority of the team they proposed to assign to our account, and the clarity of their project governance model. We had been burned by an agency that overpromised before and we needed to see evidence of process maturity.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Better than we did at the start, which sounds like an exaggeration but is genuinely accurate. The discovery workshop they ran surfaced assumptions we had not examined and contradictions in our requirements that would have caused real problems mid-development. The functional specification they produced was the clearest articulation of our product that we had seen written down.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
The project management was the best I have experienced in a vendor relationship. We had fortnightly sprint reviews with structured agendas, a shared backlog that we could inspect at any point, a risk register that was actively maintained rather than created at kickoff and never opened again, and a project manager who treated our time as something worth protecting. Communication was proactive, not reactive.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
On time and within the agreed budget. They had given us a range estimate at the start, which I had been sceptical of, and they landed within the lower half of that range. Their estimation accuracy came from having broken the work down in genuine detail during discovery rather than giving a rough number and hoping. It showed in every sprint.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
The most direct measure is that the problem we hired them to solve no longer exists. Beyond that, the new CRM Development platform has reduced our operational overhead measurably, our team spends less time managing incidents and more time on product development, and we have been able to onboard two new enterprise clients who had previously cited our technical limitations as a barrier.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The quality of the written communication. This matters more than most clients articulate. Clear, concise, technically accurate updates that our non-technical stakeholders could read and understand. Proposals and change requests that made the decision obvious rather than obscuring it in jargon. That communication quality reduced our internal coordination overhead significantly.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Absolutely. I would recommend them with a specific note that the quality of the discovery process is where the value starts. Clients who invest properly in that phase will get the most out of the engagement. We made that investment and the returns are evident in the quality of what was delivered.
Our most downloaded release ever, built by a team that truly listened
Charlotte Whitfield / Head of Digital Commerce - Sterling Retail PLC
Verified
Jan 14, 2023
Jan 14, 2023
Project summary: Regulatory changes required us to rebuild our client reporting module from the ground up with full audit trail, real-time data, and a compliant data residency model.
Project governance was one of the things that impressed me most. We had a dedicated project manager who ran tight fortnightly sprints with clear acceptance criteria, a shared backlog that gave us full visibility at all times, and a change request process that was fair and transparent. Nothing slipped through the cracks, no bill shock at the end, and the final delivery matched the original scope document almost perfectly. In my experience that kind of discipline is genuinely uncommon.
PROS
Consistent delivery against milestones, code quality that passed our internal review without major findings, post-launch support that felt like a partnership not a ticket queue
CONS
We underestimated the internal resource commitment required on our side during discovery — the team warned us, we did not listen fully, and the first sprint was slower as a result
Project TypeMobile App Development
IndustryFinancial Services
Project Cost$10,000 to $49,999
DurationJan 2025 – Jun 2025
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Sterling Retail PLC operates across the Financial Services sector with offices in Manchester, UK. In my capacity as Head of Digital Commerce I oversee both the strategic and operational technology agenda. We are a growth-stage business that needed a development partner capable of scaling with us rather than constraining us.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Our Financial Services regulatory environment had changed and the compliance timeline was non-negotiable. We needed to rebuild specific components of our system to meet the new requirements and our internal team was already fully committed to the core product roadmap. Bringing in a specialist Mobile App Development partner was the only realistic path.
What services did the company provide for your project?
Primarily Mobile App Development, though the scope naturally touched adjacent areas. They handled architecture design, implementation, integration with our existing systems, performance testing under realistic load, and knowledge transfer to our internal team. The breadth of what they covered without requiring us to bring in additional vendors was one of the reasons the project ran efficiently.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
A direct referral from a peer who had used them for a comparable Mobile App Development engagement in the Financial Services space. That peer's experience had been excellent and their project profile was similar enough to ours that the recommendation carried real weight. Everything we found during our own evaluation reinforced that this was the right decision.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Better than we did at the start, which sounds like an exaggeration but is genuinely accurate. The discovery workshop they ran surfaced assumptions we had not examined and contradictions in our requirements that would have caused real problems mid-development. The functional specification they produced was the clearest articulation of our product that we had seen written down.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
The project management was the best I have experienced in a vendor relationship. We had fortnightly sprint reviews with structured agendas, a shared backlog that we could inspect at any point, a risk register that was actively maintained rather than created at kickoff and never opened again, and a project manager who treated our time as something worth protecting. Communication was proactive, not reactive.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Yes on both counts. There was one sprint where a third-party integration took longer than scoped because of undocumented API behaviour on the vendor side. The team flagged it immediately, proposed two mitigation options, and we agreed on an approach that recovered the timeline within two weeks. That is how scope issues should be handled and rarely are.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
Hard to isolate precisely because several factors changed simultaneously, but the data we can attribute directly to the new Mobile App Development platform shows a meaningful improvement in the metrics that matter to our Financial Services business. Our account managers report that the new capability is coming up positively in client conversations, which was one of the strategic objectives we started with.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The post-launch behaviour. Some agencies disappear the moment the final invoice is paid. This team maintained the same level of responsiveness during the hypercare period as during development, handed over thorough documentation without being asked twice, and checked in proactively a month after go-live to review performance metrics with us. That last part was entirely unprompted.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Unreservedly. We are in active conversation about the next phase of work and I expect this to become a multi-year partnership. For any organisation in the Financial Services space looking for a Mobile App Development partner who combines technical rigour with genuine commercial awareness, I would put this team at the top of the shortlist.
Company Info
Founded
2005
Employees
10 - 49
Hourly Rate
$150 - $199
Client Rating
5.0/5 (4 reviews)