About The Refinery
At The Refinery they believe in being partners. When you and your project succeeds, so do they. They develop ambitious web applications that never lose sight of the people who use them. Their activities are controlled by corporate policies that define the ways of managing business, staff and client relations. Their mission is to transform traditional business industry and allow more opportunities by using the digital technology.
Services
Mobile App Development
Web Development
Mobile App Design
App Marketing
The Refinery Reviews
Write a ReviewGameplay mechanics implemented with the polish and feel our design doc demanded
Harry Drummond / IT Programme Director - Northgate Insurance Group
Verified
Sep 26, 2025
Sep 26, 2025
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.
I am a demanding client. I have a technical background, I review code, and I have high standards for documentation and testing. This team met all of those expectations without ever seeming defensive about scrutiny. Peer code reviews were welcomed, unit test coverage was genuine rather than performative, and the API documentation was thorough enough that our own developers integrated against it without a single clarification call. That level of craft is what I look for and rarely find.
PROS
Business-aware approach to every technical decision, strong project governance, fast turnaround on feedback, zero drama during a genuinely complex engagement
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
IndustryFinancial Services
Project Cost$500,000+
DurationOct 2025 – Nov 2025
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
As IT Programme Director at Northgate Insurance Group, I manage a cross-functional technology team serving our Financial Services clients from Birmingham, UK. We are a commercially focused organisation and every technology decision we make is evaluated against a clear business case. We needed a partner who understood that context, not just the technical brief.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
We had a product concept validated by market research but no clear path to build it within our budget and timeline constraints. Our Financial Services competitors were moving quickly and we could not afford to spend eighteen months finding out a generalist agency could not execute the Game Development work our product required.
What services did the company provide for your project?
Primarily Game 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 Game Development and specific knowledge of the Financial Services 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?
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 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 most direct measure is that the problem we hired them to solve no longer exists. Beyond that, the new Game 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 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 Game Development expertise, Financial Services domain knowledge, and delivery discipline is genuinely difficult to find. We found it here and we intend to keep it.
CI/CD pipeline that turned our two-week releases into same-day deployments
Priscilla Tan / Head of Engineering - AsiaPac FinTech Pte Ltd
Verified
Aug 02, 2022
Aug 02, 2022
Project summary: Citizen-facing services that had been paper-based for decades needed to be digitised in a way that was genuinely accessible to all demographics, not just the digitally confident.
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
Technical depth across the full stack, honest and timely communication, delivered exactly what was scoped without surprise additions to the invoice
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 TypeDevOps Services
IndustryGovernment & Public Sector
Project Cost$50,000 to $149,999
DurationFeb 2025 – Oct 2025
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
I lead technology at AsiaPac FinTech Pte Ltd, a mid-sized organisation in the Government & Public Sector sector headquartered in Singapore. My remit as Head of Engineering 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 DevOps Services expertise to address it properly. We needed specialists.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The full DevOps Services 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?
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 DevOps Services and specific knowledge of the Government & Public Sector 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?
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. 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 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 Government & Public Sector 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 DevOps Services expertise, Government & Public Sector domain knowledge, and delivery discipline is genuinely difficult to find. We found it here and we intend to keep it.
ETL pipeline that processes a days worth of data in under ten minutes
Derek Holloway / Chief Information Officer - Pinnacle Health Systems
Verified
Jul 21, 2022
Jul 21, 2022
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.
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
Premium pricing compared to some of the alternatives we evaluated, but the quality of the output and the absence of rework costs made the investment straightforward to justify
Project TypeData & Analytics
IndustryGaming & Gambling
Project Cost$500,000+
DurationDec 2024 – Jan 2026
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Pinnacle Health Systems is a Gaming & Gambling business based in Chicago, USA. As Chief Information 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 Data & Analytics 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 Data & Analytics 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?
A direct referral from a peer who had used them for a comparable Data & Analytics engagement in the Gaming & Gambling 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?
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 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 Gaming & Gambling 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 Data & Analytics expertise, Gaming & Gambling domain knowledge, and delivery discipline is genuinely difficult to find. We found it here and we intend to keep it.
Company Info
Founded
2005
Employees
10 - 49
Hourly Rate
$50 - $99
Client Rating
5.0/5 (3 reviews)