About Huia
It is a digital mobile app development company that uses the latest technologies to produce interactive solutions. They are based in Brazil and have a team of very qualified developers & creatives to produce high profile projects. Their focus is on developing the great user experience. They produce innovative ways of providing the app for your end user's beliefs.
Services
Mobile App Development
Web Development
UI-UX Design
Custom Software Development
Web Design
Social Media Marketing
Huia Reviews
Write a ReviewBespoke software that solved a problem no off-the-shelf tool could touch
Lachlan Burgess / Chief Digital Officer - Harbour Digital Pty Ltd
Verified
Apr 30, 2025
Apr 30, 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
Domain knowledge that went beyond generic expertise into our specific industry, willingness to push back constructively, automated test coverage that gave us deployment confidence
CONS
Their calendar books up quickly which made scheduling the initial kickoff slightly challenging — a good problem for them to have and not one that affected our delivery
Project TypeSoftware Development
IndustrySports & Fitness
Project Cost$50,000 to $149,999
DurationJun 2025 – Feb 2026
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Harbour Digital Pty Ltd operates across the Sports & Fitness sector with offices in Sydney, Australia. In my capacity as Chief Digital Officer 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 existing Software 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?
Primarily Software 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?
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 Software Development and specific knowledge of the Sports & Fitness 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?
Thorough and precise. They translated our business language into technical requirements without losing the intent, which is a skill that sounds straightforward but frequently goes wrong. Every user story they wrote was reviewed against the original business objective before it entered the sprint and the acceptance criteria were specific enough to remove subjectivity from QA.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Professional and efficient. We used a shared project management tool that gave our stakeholders visibility without requiring them to attend every meeting. The project manager had a clear escalation path and used it appropriately. The only time I needed to intervene directly was when I chose to, not because something had been missed.
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?
We went live three months ago. In that time we have not had a single P1 incident, our page performance scores have improved across every measure, and the feature we had deprioritised for years because the old architecture made it too complex to implement is now in our next sprint. The platform they built has opened up our roadmap in a way we had not anticipated.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The intellectual honesty. They told us when something we wanted was a bad idea and explained why. They told us when a timeline was tight and gave us options. They did not tell us what we wanted to hear in order to win work or avoid a difficult conversation. In a long engagement that kind of relationship is far more valuable than an agency that just says yes.
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 Software Development expertise, Sports & Fitness domain knowledge, and delivery discipline is genuinely difficult to find. We found it here and we intend to keep it.
SEO strategy that moved us from page three to page one in four months
Femke Hoekstra / Head of IT - Delta Logistics BV
Verified
Feb 13, 2024
Feb 13, 2024
Project summary: Our competitors had been investing in technology for two years and we needed to close a meaningful gap quickly without compromising on the quality of what we shipped.
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
Engineering quality that our internal team can maintain without calling the vendor, thorough documentation, proactive risk identification throughout the project
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 TypeDigital Marketing
IndustryConstruction
Project Cost$500,000+
DurationAug 2025 – Mar 2026
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Delta Logistics BV is a Construction business based in Rotterdam, Netherlands. As Head of IT 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?
Growth into new markets had exposed serious limitations in our platform. What had worked for our original user base in Rotterdam, Netherlands was not going to scale internationally, and the Digital Marketing requirements for those new markets were meaningfully different. We needed a partner who had solved that kind of problem before.
What services did the company provide for your project?
End-to-end Digital Marketing delivery with a particular emphasis on the integration layer that connected the new build to our existing Construction infrastructure. They also provided UI/UX input that was not in the original scope but which they offered proactively because they could see it would affect adoption. That kind of initiative was characteristic of how they approached the whole engagement.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
A direct referral from a peer who had used them for a comparable Digital Marketing engagement in the Construction 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?
Extremely well. They asked detailed questions, challenged vague requirements until they were specific, and proposed sensible defaults for decisions we had not yet made rather than just leaving them open. By the time development started there was no ambiguity in the backlog, which is a rare starting position.
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 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?
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?
The intellectual honesty. They told us when something we wanted was a bad idea and explained why. They told us when a timeline was tight and gave us options. They did not tell us what we wanted to hear in order to win work or avoid a difficult conversation. In a long engagement that kind of relationship is far more valuable than an agency that just says yes.
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 Digital Marketing expertise, Construction domain knowledge, and delivery discipline is genuinely difficult to find. We found it here and we intend to keep it.
CMS migration completed without losing a single page of SEO equity
Maryam Al-Zahrani / Head of Innovation - Al-Salam Digital Solutions
Verified
Jun 14, 2023
Jun 14, 2023
Project summary: Underwriting decisions that should have taken minutes were taking days because of a legacy policy administration system that predated modern API architecture.
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
Senior engineers on our account throughout the entire project rather than a bait-and-switch to juniors after contract signing, transparent reporting, realistic estimates that proved accurate
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 TypeCMS Development
IndustryInsurance
Project Cost$500,000+
DurationNov 2024 – Apr 2025
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Al-Salam Digital Solutions is a Insurance business based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. As Head of Innovation 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?
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 CMS Development expertise to address it properly. We needed specialists.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The core engagement was CMS Development 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?
Their portfolio included two projects that were sufficiently close to our own brief in terms of complexity, CMS Development scope, and Insurance context that we felt confident they understood what we were asking. The proposal was technically rigorous, the pricing was transparent, and the proposed team structure gave us senior engineers throughout rather than just for the pitch.
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?
Communication was handled primarily asynchronously given the time zone difference between Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and the team's base, but it was managed so well that the gap rarely felt like a constraint. Written updates were clear and timely, escalations were handled promptly, and we never had to chase for a status update. The cadence was exactly right — enough to feel informed, not so much that it created overhead.
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?
Quantitatively: user engagement metrics are up significantly since launch, our support ticket volume has dropped, and we have received unsolicited positive feedback from clients who noticed the improvement. Qualitatively: our internal team is proud of the product we now have, which affects morale and retention in ways that do not show up on a dashboard but matter enormously.
What did you like most about working with this company?
The continuity of the team. The engineers who scoped the work were the engineers who built it. That sounds like it should be standard practice but in my experience it often is not. The institutional knowledge that comes from that continuity pays dividends at every stage, particularly when you are dealing with a complex Insurance domain where context takes time to build.
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 CMS Development expertise, Insurance domain knowledge, and delivery discipline is genuinely difficult to find. We found it here and we intend to keep it.
Game shipped on time, on budget, and rated above four stars on launch day
Harry Drummond / IT Programme Director - Northgate Insurance Group
Verified
Dec 13, 2022
Dec 13, 2022
Project summary: Our institution was running five disconnected systems for admissions, learning management, assessments, and student communications — we needed them unified into one cohesive platform.
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
Their calendar books up quickly which made scheduling the initial kickoff slightly challenging — a good problem for them to have and not one that affected our delivery
Project TypeGame Development
IndustryEducation
Project Cost$150,000 to $499,999
DurationMar 2025 – Apr 2025
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
I lead technology at Northgate Insurance Group, a mid-sized organisation in the Education sector headquartered in Birmingham, UK. My remit as IT Programme Director 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?
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 Game Development expertise to address it properly. We needed specialists.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The full Game 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?
Their portfolio included two projects that were sufficiently close to our own brief in terms of complexity, Game Development scope, and Education context that we felt confident they understood what we were asking. The proposal was technically rigorous, the pricing was transparent, and the proposed team structure gave us senior engineers throughout rather than just for the pitch.
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?
Communication was handled primarily asynchronously given the time zone difference between Birmingham, UK and the team's base, but it was managed so well that the gap rarely felt like a constraint. Written updates were clear and timely, escalations were handled promptly, and we never had to chase for a status update. The cadence was exactly right — enough to feel informed, not so much that it created overhead.
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 Education 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?
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, without qualification. I have already made two direct referrals to peers in the Education sector who were facing similar Game Development challenges. In both cases I gave the recommendation specifically because I was confident the experience would match what I described — which is a level of confidence I do not extend lightly.
Company Info
Founded
2012
Employees
10 - 49
Hourly Rate
$50 - $99
Client Rating
5.0/5 (4 reviews)