Eighteen North · 18°N

A studio, and the decade of work behind it.

Eighteen North is a founder-led software studio in Kingston, Jamaica, 18° north of the equator, the coordinate it’s named for. It’s run by Romario Fitzgerald, and we design and build production web applications end to end: the product, the interface, the data model, the infrastructure, and the parts most teams would rather not touch.

Much of the work aims at the Caribbean: markets the big platforms don’t serve well, or at all. That has meant building a real card-payments platform where Stripe won’t operate, a free clinical-software suite small clinics can genuinely run, marketplaces for cars, homes, food and developers, and the quiet infrastructure underneath. It’s the work of years, not a portfolio assembled for show.

29
products built
24
live in production
7
fields worked in
Since 2018
the better part of a decade

How it started

It started in 2018 with FleekSite, a multi-tenant website and store builder for small Caribbean businesses. The commerce inside it, taking card payments in a market the global processors skip, turned out to be the hard, valuable part, and it grew until it was unbundled into its own company: Inkress, now a payments-and-marketplace platform in production since 2022.

One product became a body of work. Healthcare software when a clinic needed it. A restaurant-discovery app because searching by craving beat searching by venue. Monitoring, analytics, SSL, email: the infrastructure the other products leaned on, each built properly enough to stand on its own. Eighteen North is the studio that gathers all of it under one name, and takes on new work in the same spirit.

What we do

Concept to production, end to end. The whole thing, not a slice of it. That’s the same person thinking through the payment ledger, drawing the interface, choosing the data model, and running the deploy. It shows up across a handful of fields:

  • Payments & fintechCard payments, ledgers and risk, where the global processors won't operate.
  • HealthcareClinical software a small clinic can actually run, free and self-hostable.
  • Marketplaces & consumerDiscovery and aggregation built for real local markets, not a generic template.
  • E-commerce & ShopifyApps that do the hard commerce things correctly: server-verified pricing, server-side tracking.
  • Developer & infrastructureThe quiet layer underneath: SSL fleets, observability, transactional email, image delivery.
  • Analytics & dataPrivacy-first measurement you can shape yourself, without the cookie-banner tax.
  • Business & vertical SaaSTools built for one trade's real rules (local tax, local paperwork), not a reskin.

If you’re weighing a build in one of these, or the hard parts in between, the work speaks to it.

How we work

  • Ship something real

    Not a demo or a deck: a product in production, with the unglamorous last mile actually finished. Most of the work here is live.

  • Get the hard details right

    Payments that reconcile to the cent, records that can't be quietly rewritten, schedules that never double-book. The hard details are the product.

  • Build for real conditions

    A mid-range Android on a patchy signal, local tax and certificates, the way people actually pay and work. Designed for, not around.

  • Own the whole stack

    Product, interface, data model, infrastructure and the deploy: one team accountable end to end, not a hand-off between four that no one owns.

  • Fail closed

    When a check can't run, the system holds rather than guesses. Safe by default under failure, not only when everything's working.

  • Stay honest about maturity

    Live is live and pre-launch is pre-launch. A credibility site loses more from one caught exaggeration than a dozen superlatives ever buy.

Working together

Eighteen North is available for select work: product and infrastructure builds, especially the parts other teams would rather avoid: a payment rail, a permissions model that has to be right, an offline-capable app for somewhere the network is unreliable, a migration nobody wants to own.

The best fit is a real problem with real constraints, where end-to-end ownership and getting the details right matter more than headcount. Caribbean-focused or not, the discipline travels.

Have something to build, or want to collaborate?

18n@inkress.com

Romario Fitzgerald · Eighteen North · 18°N