Engineering for products that carry real money.
Firstdrop designs, builds and operates the software behind payment, fintech and iGaming platforms. Ledgers, wallets, integrations and back offices, delivered to production and kept there.
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- service lines
- 6service lines
- regulated industries
- 4regulated industries
- ledger under it all
- 1ledger under it all
Full-cycle delivery for platforms that hold other people's money.
From a single integration to a complete platform, we take products from architecture to production and keep them running under service levels you can plan around.
Custom platform development
Wallets, ledgers, back offices and customer-facing applications designed around your domain, from architecture through production release.
- Web
- Mobile
- APIs
- Back office
Payments and integrations
Card acquirers, bank rails, open banking and crypto processors behind one integration layer, with routing, retries and reconciliation built in.
- PSP
- Open banking
- Crypto
- Webhooks
Compliance engineering
Identity verification, sanctions screening, transaction monitoring and audit logging built as product features rather than bolted on before an audit.
- KYC
- AML
- Audit trail
Cloud and platform engineering
Event-driven services on Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, and observability on every service so the platform behaves the same at launch and at scale.
- Kubernetes
- Terraform
- AWS
- GCP
Data and reporting
Settlement reports, regulator submissions and operator dashboards fed by pipelines that reconcile to the ledger, not to a spreadsheet.
- Pipelines
- Dashboards
- Regulatory
Dedicated teams and operations
Embedded engineering pods that plug into your roadmap, and managed operations under clear service levels once the platform is live.
- Team extension
- SLA
- On-call
Uptime target across managed platforms
Wallet settlement at the 95th percentile
Payment and identity providers integrated
Operations coverage with named engineers
One reference architecture, tuned to each product.
Every platform we build shares the same shape: a gateway in front, focused services in the middle, and a ledger every one of them posts to. Hover a service to see what it is responsible for.
Ledger
Double-entry postings are the only way money moves. Balances are derived, reports reconcile to the cent.
- Entries
- append-only
- Balance
- derived
- Audit
- complete
Built for the parts that cannot fail.
Security, settlement integrity and uptime are not features we add before an audit. They are how every service is designed from the first commit.
- Languages
- TypeScript, Go, Java, Kotlin, Python
- Services
- Node, Spring Boot, gRPC, Kafka, Redis
- Data
- PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, BigQuery, dbt
- Platform
- Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, GCP, Grafana
Balanced by construction
Every movement of money is a double-entry posting. Balances are derived, never stored as a mutable number, so the ledger cannot drift.
Safe to retry
Idempotency keys on every write, outbox delivery for events, and exactly-once settlement even when a provider times out mid-request.
Observed end to end
Traces, metrics and alerts on each service, with dashboards your operations team reads daily rather than a status page nobody opens.
Least privilege and audited
Encryption at rest and in transit, scoped access, and an append-only audit log that satisfies regulators and your own investigations.
Domain depth where software carries real weight.
We work best where a bug is a financial event and a regulator reads the logs.
Payments and fintech
Wallets, ledgers, acquiring integrations and payout rails for licensed money service businesses and neobanks.
iGaming and sportsbook
Player accounts, game aggregation, bonus engines and settlement for operators in regulated markets.
Digital assets
Custody flows, on and off ramps, and exchange back offices with reconciliation across chains and fiat.
Marketplaces and SaaS
Multi-tenant platforms that hold funds on behalf of others and need the controls that come with it.
A route to production we have walked before.
Four stages, each with a written output you can review. The line below fills as you read, the same way the plan fills in as we go.
- 01
Scope
We map your markets, licences, providers and constraints into a written scope, a team and a fixed timeline.
- 02
Design
Architecture, data model and integration contracts agreed before any production code, with the risky parts prototyped first.
- 03
Build
Short delivery cycles with a demo every week, automated tests on every merge, and a staging environment that mirrors production.
- 04
Operate
Controlled launch, then monitoring and maintenance under clear service levels by the engineers who built the system.
Sketch your scope. See the team and the timeline.
Pick the modules your product needs. The estimate below is indicative and comes from how long these pieces have taken us before. A written scope with a fixed date follows a discovery call.
Indicative timeline
10weeks
- Discovery
- 2 wk
- Build
- 6 wk
- Hardening and launch
- 2 wk
Team of 7
- solution architect1
- backend engineers3
- frontend engineers1
- QA engineer1
- platform engineer1
Model the business, not only the build.
Set your markets, customers, deposits and payment mix. The launch model shows monthly revenue, where the money goes, and the month your build budget comes back. Share any scenario as a link.
A company named after the first release to production.
The first drop is the moment a plan becomes a running system with real customers and real money in it. Everything before that is a promise. We named the company after the moment we are measured on.
Firstdrop Ltd is a business company registered in the British Virgin Islands, working with clients across Europe, Latin America and Asia through a distributed team of senior engineers. We pair that engineering with disciplined delivery: code review, automated tests and observability on every service, and a demo every week.
Whether you need a platform built from zero or a team to extend one you already run, we bring the people and the process to ship it and keep it up.
Why teams choose Firstdrop
Senior engineers only
Every engagement is staffed by people who have run this class of system in production.
Written scope, fixed timeline
You know what is being built, by whom, and when it ships before work starts.
Your code, your data
Intellectual property transfers to you. Work happens under NDA in your repositories.
Built to hand over
Documentation, runbooks and tests come with the code, so you are never locked in.
Questions we are asked before the first call.
- What does Firstdrop do?
- Firstdrop is a software and platform engineering company. We design, build and operate the systems behind payment, fintech and iGaming products: double-entry ledgers, real-time wallets, payment and identity integrations, compliance tooling, back offices and the cloud infrastructure they run on.
- Which industries does Firstdrop work in?
- Payments and fintech, iGaming and sportsbook, digital assets, and marketplaces or SaaS platforms that hold funds on behalf of others. The common thread is money moving through software under a regulator's eye.
- How long does it take to build a payments or iGaming platform?
- A first production release typically takes 10 to 24 weeks depending on the modules involved. Two weeks of discovery produce a written scope and fixed timeline, build runs in weekly demo cycles, and two to three weeks of hardening precede launch. The scope builder on this page gives an indicative range for your module mix.
- Does Firstdrop handle KYC, AML and regulatory reporting?
- Yes. Identity verification, sanctions screening, transaction monitoring, audit logging and regulator reports are built as product features from the start rather than added before an audit. We integrate the verification and screening providers you choose or already use.
- Does Firstdrop run the platform after launch?
- Yes. We offer managed operations under written service levels, with 24/7 monitoring and named engineers who built the system. Clients who prefer to run it themselves receive documentation, runbooks and tests with the code.
- How is a project priced?
- Every engagement starts with a written scope, a named team and a fixed timeline agreed before production code. Pricing follows that scope. Dedicated teams and managed operations are billed monthly against agreed service levels.
- Where is Firstdrop registered and where does the team work?
- Firstdrop Ltd is a business company registered in the British Virgin Islands. The engineering team is distributed and works with clients across Europe, Latin America and Asia in their time zones.
- What is the launch model?
- A free interactive tool on this site that models the monthly economics of an online casino, sportsbook, payments wallet or fintech app. You set markets, customers, deposits and payment mix; it returns revenue, a cost breakdown, margin and the month the build budget is recovered. Each scenario is encoded in the page address so it can be shared as a link.
Tell us what you are building.
Describe the product, the markets and the timeline. We reply within two business days with a plan, a team and a date.
hello@firstdrop.tech