Why this belongs next to Magento work

Agency employment and niche custom work are not enemies. The first pays the bills and sharpens craft on complex platforms. The second is a hedge and a vocation: AI is compressing the cost of building and maintaining software, which also means some “employee as coding machine” roles are at risk over a few years. I have written about that labour-and-ethics framing in Reading Obsolete and related notes. The constructive answer is not despair — it is to use the productivity boost for projects that were previously unthinkable because the budget could never carry a classic custom build or years of expensive maintenance.

What “niche” means here

• Small applications that improve how an NGO, co-op, club or small company actually works day to day
• Web + mobile when that is the real surface (not a brochure site pretending to be a product)
• Delivery measured in weeks or a few months, not multi-year programmes
• Maintenance that stays affordable because the stack is forkable, typed, tested and owned by humans who can still read it

Choosing a stack carefully (not pitching one product)

For customer projects that want web + mobile from shared logic, one illustrative example I use in conversation is Umbraculum (brochure, docs) — not because I run it as my own daily product, and not as an endorsement or preferred vendor pitch. I first encountered it in early Cursor chats; its licences and project posture (open, forkable, serious about governance) make it a sensible reference for niche builds. There are many other options. What matters is choosing with caution:

• Forkability — can you leave without begging a vendor?
• Licence — AGPL / copyleft / OSI-clear terms you can explain to a board
• Right tools and languages — TypeScript/PHP/etc. your maintainers can hire for
• Ethics — privacy, labour, and “who owns the judgment when AI helps write the code”

More detail — and concrete application sketches — in the note Niche projects as future prospect.