About the company

We are a small studio. Six people. Five live plugin products. Two AI receptionists running our own businesses. One book about how we work. Every project is delivered by people you'll meet on the discovery call.

Meet the team

Bill Amos — Managing Director and lead developer. Over 20 years of SEO experience and more than a decade building WordPress systems, plugins, and automation tools. Author of Building Without Code. Fast moving, detail focused, and usually powered by coffee.

Matthew Bircher MBCS RITTech — Lead developer specialising in WordPress, React, APIs, and custom systems. The technical backbone behind much of our plugin development and integrations. Always exploring new frameworks, tools, and smarter ways to build.

Maria Amos — Design, content, and creative direction. The reason our work feels polished, consistent, and human. Focused on branding, social media, visuals, and making sure every detail looks right and reads naturally.

Our methodology, in a book

Building Without Code is a book about how to deliver production-grade custom software using AI as a development partner, with the engineering discipline of a senior team. It is built around the story of the Learner Management System for South Cumbria Skills Exchange — a system that commercial alternatives quoted £97,500 to £137,500 for, built in 23 calendar days for £260 in hard costs.

The book documents the methodology in detail. The Project File as the AI's external memory. Sandwich prompts pairing Team Brief, Task and Restraints. Milestone-based journals with file-level change tracking. The separation between architectural thinking (done with Claude) and code execution (done with Wilson, our name for GitHub Copilot).

It is honest about what works, what doesn't, what we got wrong, and what the limits are. It is not a sales pitch for AI tools — it is a working manual for delivering real software with them.

Our history

Bill Amos founded Whamos Ltd in 2020 as a web design and SEO agency in Millom, Cumbria. The company quickly became known for honest pricing, technical depth, and client work that lasted beyond the launch.

By 2024, more and more client work was custom development — plugins, integrations, AI-assisted systems — that didn't quite sit under a web design brand. Technophobia Ltd was founded as the sister company specifically for the custom software side of the work. Whamos continues to do websites and SEO; Technophobia does plugins, AI, automation and bespoke systems.

The companies share a team, a methodology, and a culture: honest, technical, low-bullshit, focused on the long-term success of clients rather than the quick contract win. Many clients use both companies — a new website from Whamos with a custom plugin built by Technophobia is a common combination.

ISO and certifications

Technophobia Ltd holds four current certifications — ISO 9001 (quality management), ISO 27001 (information security), ISO 42001 (AI management systems), and Cyber Essentials. All audited by accredited bodies, all current. The certification number for Cyber Essentials is 473712024.

That combination is genuinely rare for a UK studio of our size. ISO 27001 in particular is what most boutique agencies don't have — it requires documented information security management, risk assessment, audit logs, access controls, and incident response procedures. ISO 42001 is even rarer because the standard itself only emerged recently and few small businesses have adopted it yet. We adopted it because AI is core to how we work and the standard codifies how to manage that responsibly.

For clients in regulated industries (training providers, financial services, healthcare adjacent, public sector), our certification stack makes us a much easier supplier to onboard than an uncertified studio.

What we believe

The reason Technophobia exists is that most modern business software is built on extractive economics. SaaS subscriptions designed to grow forever. Vendor lock-in by design. Pricing tiers that punish growth. Data exports that mysteriously stop including the most important fields. Features that move to higher tiers as soon as they become essential.

We think small businesses deserve better than that. Software should serve the business that pays for it. The data should belong to the business that generates it. The code should be ownable, modifiable and portable. When the relationship with a supplier ends, the business shouldn't be left with a forced migration and a six-month panic.

That is why we build the way we do. Custom plugins, code ownership transferred on delivery, no SaaS lock-in, open standards where possible. It is harder to scale a business that doesn't trap customers — but it is the only business model that actually serves them, so it is the one we are running.

Sister company: Whamos Ltd

Whamos Ltd is our sister company. It does web design, SEO, content production, social media and video work. Same team, same culture, joined-up delivery.

When a Technophobia client needs a new website to host the custom plugin we're building for them, Whamos handles it. When a Whamos web design client needs custom functionality their site can't do off-the-shelf, Technophobia handles it. The two companies cross-refer constantly and most projects involve both.

Whamos pricing: Silver from £2,500, Gold from £5,000, Platinum from £7,500, parish councils from £2,000, town councils from £3,000, charities from £2,000. Maintenance: Standard £25/month or £250/year, Full £50/month or £500/year. Annual pricing equates to 10 months paid, 2 months free.

If your project crosses both companies, you talk to one person and we coordinate internally.

Technophobia

n8n automation for small teams. UK-based. Fast turnarounds. Clear handovers.

Address
South Cumbria Skills Exchange
Millom
LA18 4JS
United Kingdom

Phone +44 01229 774591
Email hello@technophobia.uk

VAT registered • GDPR-aligned • Typical lead time: 1–2 business days

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