About Upsource
Upsource is a national brand and internet marketing company that combines cutting-edge creativity with technical expertise to develop your online brand. Since 2011, they have helped thousands of law firms and attorneys compete and succeed in their communities. They provide review monitoring and generation to make sure you stand out and have a fighting chance in your market.
Services
Mobile App Development
Web Development
VR App Development
Upsource Reviews
Write a ReviewCustom CRM that replaced four spreadsheets and a lot of tribal knowledge
Jisoo Kwon / CTO - HanRiver Tech Co Ltd
Verified
Jan 13, 2024
Jan 13, 2024
Project summary: Our client portal was a reputational liability — we needed it to reflect the same standard of professionalism our lawyers delivered in person.
The engagement started with a discovery workshop that immediately signalled this team was different. They pushed back on two of our assumptions in the first session with evidence and a better alternative. That kind of intellectual honesty is rare and it set the tone for the whole project. Deliverables were consistently ahead of schedule, code reviews were taken seriously, and the final product is something we are proud to show enterprise clients during due diligence calls.
PROS
Technical depth across the full stack, honest and timely communication, delivered exactly what was scoped without surprise additions to the invoice
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 TypeCRM Development
IndustryLegal Services
Project CostLess than $10,000
DurationJun 2025 – Apr 2026
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
I lead technology at HanRiver Tech Co Ltd, a mid-sized organisation in the Legal Services sector headquartered in Seoul, South Korea. My remit as CTO 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?
Growth into new markets had exposed serious limitations in our platform. What had worked for our original user base in Seoul, South Korea was not going to scale internationally, and the CRM Development 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 CRM Development delivery with a particular emphasis on the integration layer that connected the new build to our existing Legal Services 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?
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?
The requirements understanding was solid from early on, aided by the fact that they had prior experience in the Legal Services 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?
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 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?
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 CRM Development engagement, this team is the answer.
Technically excellent, commercially aware, and genuinely pleasant to work with
Fernanda Costa / VP of Technology - Vento Retail SA
Verified
Aug 26, 2023
Aug 26, 2023
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.
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
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
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 TypeEmbedded Systems Development
IndustryGovernment & Public Sector
Project CostLess than $10,000
DurationFeb 2025 – Mar 2025
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
As VP of Technology at Vento Retail SA, I manage a cross-functional technology team serving our Government & Public Sector clients from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 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?
Our Government & Public Sector 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 Embedded Systems Development partner was the only realistic path.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The core engagement was Embedded Systems 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?
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 Embedded Systems 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?
The requirements understanding was solid from early on, aided by the fact that they had prior experience in the Government & Public Sector 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?
Communication was handled primarily asynchronously given the time zone difference between Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 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?
Hard to isolate precisely because several factors changed simultaneously, but the data we can attribute directly to the new Embedded Systems Development platform shows a meaningful improvement in the metrics that matter to our Government & Public Sector 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 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?
Yes, without qualification. I have already made two direct referrals to peers in the Government & Public Sector sector who were facing similar Embedded Systems 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
2011
Employees
2 - 9
Hourly Rate
N/A
Client Rating
5.0/5 (2 reviews)