About us

A small studio that finishes things

Anvilstead is the software studio brand of Hefei Tuoluren Information Technology Co., Ltd., a company registered in Hefei, China. We design and build mobile apps, custom software and websites — for our own products and for clients in North America and Europe.

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The Anvilstead team at work

How we measure ourselves

100%
Source code handed over
Every week
Weekly working demo
< 1 day
Typical reply time
30 days
Aftercare after launch

What we will not compromise on

These are the rules we run projects by. They cost us some deals, and they are why the clients we have stay.

The code is yours

Work is committed to a repository you control from the first week. Your accounts, domains and credentials stay yours — no hostage situations at the end.

Fixed price, written scope

If we underestimate our own effort, we absorb it. The price only moves when the scope moves, and only after you approve it in writing.

A demo, not a status report

Every milestone ends with something you can open and click. If a week produced nothing demoable, we say that plainly instead of writing around it.

Honest tech choices

We recommend the boring option when it is the right one, and we will tell you when a feature is not worth building yet.

Nothing hidden in the invoice

No surprise line items. If something is out of scope, you hear it before we do the work, not after.

We say no to bad fits

If your project needs a skill we do not have, or a deadline nobody could hit, we will say so on the first call rather than take the deposit.

Where we are, and why it works

Based in China. Working to your calendar.

We would rather be upfront about where we are than pretend to be somewhere we are not.

You are hiring a team, not a time zone

A small senior team in China, working in English, holding real overlap hours with Europe and North America every working day.

The time difference runs in your favour

Work you approve at the end of your day is usually done before your next morning. You get a full build day out of every night.

Everything is written down

Because we are not sitting next to you, decisions, demo recordings and updates all live in your tracker — which turns out to be better documentation than most teams have anyway.

No language friction

Calls, specs, tickets, commit messages and documentation are all in English. You will not be handed a deliverable you cannot read.

A distributed team working across time zones

Our trajectory

Product team first, studio second

We learned how to deliver by building and running our own products, then applied those habits to client work.

  1. We designed, built and shipped products ourselves

    Mobile apps and web platforms, taken all the way through store review, release, analytics and live support — not prototypes handed to someone else.

  2. The same discipline applied to client projects

    Written scope, fixed price, two-week milestones, source code in the client’s repository. The process came from needing it ourselves.

  3. Custom platforms and multilingual product sites

    Multi-tenant systems, WordPress product sites with per-language content, integrations and performance work for businesses that had outgrown off-the-shelf tools.

  4. Working with teams in North America and Europe

    English-first, async by default, with a daily overlap window and a deliberately small project roster so senior people stay on your project.

Company details:Anvilstead is a brand operated by Hefei Tuoluren Information Technology Co., Ltd. (合肥拓路人信息科技有限公司). Contracts, invoices and payment details are issued under that entity.

Want to work with a studio that says no?

We take on a handful of projects at a time. If yours is a fit, we will tell you what it takes and what it costs.

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