About Platform45
Platform45 has been in business since 2008, delivering technology projects for clients. Their core services include UI/UX Design. Platform45 employs 50 - 249 people. Typical hourly rates run around $50 - $99 / hr/hr. Their home base is Johannesburg, South Africa. These details offer a useful starting point when evaluating Platform45.
Where We Specialize
Industry Expertise
Typical Project Size
Platform45 Reviews
Write a ReviewRoadmap that finally put our infrastructure investment in language the CFO could approve
Yuki Hashimoto / Head of Product Development - East Asia Commerce KKMay 29, 2026
Project summary: Our client portal had been built in 2017 and had not received meaningful investment since. Clients were contrasting it unfavourably with the portals of our competitors in pitches.
Our stakeholder group included board members, clinical leads, compliance officers, and end users — each with different technical literacy and different success criteria. This team navigated that stakeholder landscape as well as any vendor I have seen. They adjusted their communication register depending on the audience without losing the substance. They managed expectations honestly throughout. And they delivered a system that each group can point to as meeting their requirements. That breadth is genuinely uncommon.
Deep domain knowledge that reduced the discovery overhead significantly, proactive risk identification before issues became incidents, delivery cadence that our stakeholders found reassuring
The quality of documentation they produce means our team needed to set aside dedicated review time to do it justice — a minor scheduling point rather than a genuine criticism
Questions & Answers
A QA partner who treated our product quality as a personal responsibility
Matthieu Renard / Directeur Technique - Lumière Technologies SASMay 27, 2026
Project summary: Several years of incremental development had left us with a platform that was technically functional but strategically limiting. A structured rebuild was the agreed path forward.
What made the most difference in practice was the quality of the engineering judgment on this team. Not the ability to execute a specification — that is a baseline expectation. The ability to recognise when a specification was suboptimal, explain why, propose an alternative, and support the client in making a decision about it. That consultative dimension elevated the output beyond what the brief described and resulted in a product that is more fit for purpose than the one we had originally specified.
Collaborative culture that made the team feel like a genuine extension of our organisation, strong asynchronous communication across time zones, zero-drama handling of the inevitable mid-project changes
Time zone coordination required some deliberate overlap management from both sides in the first couple of sprints, after which we had an efficient async rhythm that worked for the whole project
Questions & Answers
A technology investment that delivered returns ahead of the business case we approved
Beatriz Cavalcanti / Chief Digital Officer - Cerrado Tech SAMay 26, 2026
Project summary: Several years of incremental development had left us with a platform that was technically functional but strategically limiting. A structured rebuild was the agreed path forward.
Six months after go-live our platform is processing three times the transaction volume we specified in the original brief. The architecture choices made during discovery accommodated that growth without remediation work. That is the difference between a team that designs for what you tell them and a team that designs for what you are likely to need. We are in conversation about a Phase 2 engagement and I expect to be using this partnership for several years.
Production system that has performed as specified since go-live without remediation work, documentation thorough enough to support internal maintenance, knowledge transfer that left our team genuinely capable
Their insistence on a detailed functional specification before development began felt like friction at the time. In retrospect, it was the reason the development phase ran without the ambiguity that has derailed similar projects for us previously
Questions & Answers
Smart contract implementation rigorous enough to satisfy both our legal and security teams
Beatriz Cavalcanti / Chief Digital Officer - Cerrado Tech SAMay 07, 2026
Project summary: Our campaign management workflow had grown to involve twelve different tools and significant manual reconciliation. The inefficiency was affecting both speed and accuracy.
The technical quality of the final deliverable is the easiest thing to point to. The automated test coverage is thorough, the deployment pipeline is reliable, the documentation is genuinely useful rather than ceremonially produced. But the metric I keep returning to is the number of post-launch conversations we have not had to have. No incident calls at two in the morning. No emergency patches. No retrospective discussions about what went wrong. The absence of those events is the evidence I would show to someone considering this vendor.
Collaborative culture that made the team feel like a genuine extension of our organisation, strong asynchronous communication across time zones, zero-drama handling of the inevitable mid-project changes
Their discovery process is more rigorous than we were accustomed to and required more preparation from our side than we had initially allocated — but the quality of what followed justified every hour of it
Questions & Answers
Consulting that delivered real options with real trade-offs rather than a predetermined answer
Dominic Fairfax / Head of Digital Transformation - Arcadian Consulting LtdApr 24, 2026
Project summary: The project had a board-facing delivery date tied to a strategic initiative. We needed a partner who would treat that date as their own, not ours.
The thing that retrospectively seems most significant is how little drama there was. Complex technology projects tend to accumulate incidents, escalations, and tense conversations. This one did not. Problems were surfaced before they became incidents. Scope changes were handled with process rather than conflict. Risks were managed rather than avoided. That level of maturity is rare in my experience and it made the delivery feel almost effortless from our side, which I know it was not from theirs.
Senior-level engineering presence throughout the entire project, not just during the pitch, honest and commercially fair handling of scope changes, codebase that our internal team praised on review
The quality of documentation they produce means our team needed to set aside dedicated review time to do it justice — a minor scheduling point rather than a genuine criticism
Questions & Answers
Custom modules that fit our operational processes rather than forcing us to change them
Siobhan Gallagher / Chief Technology Officer - Northumbria FinTech LtdApr 12, 2026
Project summary: Regulatory submission timelines required a document management platform that could handle version control, access permissions, and audit trails at a scale our existing tools were not designed for.
The technical quality of the final deliverable is the easiest thing to point to. The automated test coverage is thorough, the deployment pipeline is reliable, the documentation is genuinely useful rather than ceremonially produced. But the metric I keep returning to is the number of post-launch conversations we have not had to have. No incident calls at two in the morning. No emergency patches. No retrospective discussions about what went wrong. The absence of those events is the evidence I would show to someone considering this vendor.
Collaborative culture that made the team feel like a genuine extension of our organisation, strong asynchronous communication across time zones, zero-drama handling of the inevitable mid-project changes
The quality of documentation they produce means our team needed to set aside dedicated review time to do it justice — a minor scheduling point rather than a genuine criticism
Questions & Answers
Web3 architecture designed for the real world, not just for the pitch deck
Jia Hui Tan / VP of Engineering - RedDot Technologies Pte LtdApr 05, 2026
Project summary: A content deal had given us the rights to a major catalogue but our delivery infrastructure could not stream it reliably at scale. We needed a cloud-native video platform in under six months.
The thing that retrospectively seems most significant is how little drama there was. Complex technology projects tend to accumulate incidents, escalations, and tense conversations. This one did not. Problems were surfaced before they became incidents. Scope changes were handled with process rather than conflict. Risks were managed rather than avoided. That level of maturity is rare in my experience and it made the delivery feel almost effortless from our side, which I know it was not from theirs.
Commercially transparent throughout — no hidden assumptions, no bill shock at the end, change requests that were fair and clearly explained rather than used as a margin-recovery mechanism
The engagement was priced at the quality level rather than the budget level. We evaluated the alternatives and concluded that the delta was a reasonable premium for the reduction in delivery risk
Questions & Answers
VR training that cut certification time and is genuinely preferred by our trainees
Nisha Pillai / Director of Engineering - GrowthBridge VenturesApr 02, 2026
Project summary: B2B customer churn was concentrated among accounts that had complained about portal usability. We needed a complete redesign of the self-service experience before the next contract renewal cycle.
Six months after go-live our platform is processing three times the transaction volume we specified in the original brief. The architecture choices made during discovery accommodated that growth without remediation work. That is the difference between a team that designs for what you tell them and a team that designs for what you are likely to need. We are in conversation about a Phase 2 engagement and I expect to be using this partnership for several years.
Deep domain knowledge that reduced the discovery overhead significantly, proactive risk identification before issues became incidents, delivery cadence that our stakeholders found reassuring
Time zone coordination required some deliberate overlap management from both sides in the first couple of sprints, after which we had an efficient async rhythm that worked for the whole project
Questions & Answers
Project execution that matched the proposal in every dimension that mattered
Rupert Ashford / Director of eCommerce - Hargrove Retail PLCMar 27, 2026
Project summary: The project had a board-facing delivery date tied to a strategic initiative. We needed a partner who would treat that date as their own, not ours.
We had worked with three agencies before this engagement. The comparison is not flattering to the others. What distinguished this team was a systematic approach to understanding the problem before proposing a solution — something that sounds obvious and is practiced far less often than it should be. The delivery phase ran to schedule, the codebase is clean enough that our internal engineers made positive comments during handover review, and we have not logged a critical incident in five months of live operation. We intend to use them for our next phase of work.
Deep domain knowledge that reduced the discovery overhead significantly, proactive risk identification before issues became incidents, delivery cadence that our stakeholders found reassuring
The quality of documentation they produce means our team needed to set aside dedicated review time to do it justice — a minor scheduling point rather than a genuine criticism
Questions & Answers
Architecture review that saved us from a vendor decision we would have regretted for years
Reuben Loh / CTO - Marina Bay Ventures Pte LtdMar 26, 2026
Project summary: Cross-agency data sharing had been blocked by incompatible systems for four years. A secure integration platform was the prerequisite for every transformation initiative in our roadmap.
Six months after go-live our platform is processing three times the transaction volume we specified in the original brief. The architecture choices made during discovery accommodated that growth without remediation work. That is the difference between a team that designs for what you tell them and a team that designs for what you are likely to need. We are in conversation about a Phase 2 engagement and I expect to be using this partnership for several years.
Commercially transparent throughout — no hidden assumptions, no bill shock at the end, change requests that were fair and clearly explained rather than used as a margin-recovery mechanism
Their insistence on a detailed functional specification before development began felt like friction at the time. In retrospect, it was the reason the development phase ran without the ambiguity that has derailed similar projects for us previously