Your own Orbit: custom software without starting from scratch

Every organisation has work that no product quite fits. Planning which staff work at which location. A sign-off process that only makes sense in your industry. A way to track requests between teams. The usual answers are a spreadsheet, a workaround in a tool built for something else, or a custom project.

Custom projects solve the problem, then create new ones. The new system needs its own sign-in, its own list of users, its own permissions, its own hosting and its own backups. A few years later it's the system nobody wants to touch.

Your own Orbit is our answer. Bifröst Orbit treats content management as one slice of a wider set of business tools. When the tool you need doesn't exist yet, we build it as a satellite, on the same foundation as everything else.

Two ways to get there

Every custom satellite starts with a conversation about the problem. Where it ends depends on who it's for.

Shape it with us

If your problem is one many organisations share, it may belong in the official Orbit line-up. We shape the idea together, and if we decide it fits the family, we build it for everyone. You act as a launch partner: you help map the work, react to the screens as we sketch them and use the satellite first.

Make it yours

If the tool is specific to how you work, commission a private satellite. We build it for your organisation and it's used only by your organisation, never offered to anyone else. In Orbit it appears for your people alone, marked as made only for your organisation. What you own, such as the code and the data, is set out in your agreement before we start.

If we decide an idea doesn't fit the family, you can still commission it as a satellite of your own.

What a custom satellite gets from day one

A custom satellite is a full member of the platform, not a separate system bolted on. That's where most of the engineering effort of a one-off project disappears.

• One sign-in: Your people open it with the sign-in they already use, including your single sign-on. There's no new account to create and no password to reset.
• Your people and roles: Members, roles, organisations and regions come from Orbit, so access is in place from the start. Remove someone once and they lose access to this satellite too.
• A full audit trail: Who changed what, when and on whose behalf, including AI agents.
• Orbit Exchange: It announces what happens and listens to the other satellites, so work flows between them without wiring each pair of systems together.
• AI agents with a person in charge: Agents can help within the rights of the person they work for, and a person approves what matters.
• Hosted in the EU: It's run, backed up and monitored with the rest of the platform, with its status in Orbit.

Why this removes the usual headaches

Think about what a typical custom build spends its first months on: sign-in, user management, roles, a screen for permissions, logging, hosting, backups and monitoring. None of it is the thing you wanted. On Orbit, all of that already exists and is already looked after.

The same goes for connections. A custom tool often needs to know when something happens elsewhere, such as a person joining or a page being published. Instead of a new integration for each system, a satellite sends and receives events through Orbit Exchange. Every event follows a published contract, is checked when it's sent and again when it arrives, and is retried if it can't be delivered straight away.

Because the satellite is built like every other one, it isn't a one-off project to look after on its own. The Orbit team hosts, secures, backs up and monitors it alongside the public satellites.

How it works

1. Tell us the problem: What should be easier, who does the work today and which systems are involved. No technical brief needed.
2. Shape it together: We map the work, sketch the screens and agree what the first version does, with the people who will use it.
3. Decide the path: We tell you whether it fits the Orbit family. You choose to shape it with us, or to commission it as your own, with a written proposal and a fixed price.
4. Build, launch and grow: We build it on the Orbit foundation, launch it in your organisation and keep improving it as you learn what you need.

Cost and timing depend on what the satellite needs to do. After the first conversations you get a written proposal with the scope, the timeline and a fixed price, so you know what you get before anything is built.

An example

Take a retailer that plans who works in which shop in a shared spreadsheet. It works, until two managers edit it at once or someone leaves and still has the link. Together we map who plans the week, who needs to see it and what changes most often. Planning like this is specific to how the retailer works, so it commissions a private satellite.

On launch day, shop managers open it from Orbit with their Microsoft sign-in. Their roles and regions are already there, so each manager sees their own shops. Every change is in the audit trail, and when someone leaves the company, removing them in Orbit removes their access here too.

A foundation for the tools that come next

Commissioning a satellite isn't only buying one tool. It's investing in a foundation where every future internal tool launches behind the same sign-in, with the same people, roles, audit trail and hosting. Each new tool starts with less to build.

What would make your work easier? Tell us about the tool you're missing, and we'll come back with how we'd shape it and which path fits. Read more on the Your own Orbit page.