Arkency

Arkency has been building and fixing Rails applications since 2006, operating out of Wrocław, Poland. The founding team, led by CEO Andrzej Krzywda (a software architect who writes books on domain-driven design), has grown to about a dozen senior developers. They work remotely and asynchronously, avoiding meetings and long synchronous discussions. The company focuses on three things: saving Rails apps from collapse, modernizing legacy codebases, and helping teams understand complex system design. They charge by project or team, though pricing specifics aren't public.

Services and capabilities

Arkency's main offering is Ruby on Rails development and upgrades. They handle modernization of legacy Rails apps—taking systems that are hard to add features to or slow to deploy—and implementing architectural patterns to make them maintainable again. Rails version upgrades are a core service; they manage migrations to the latest Ruby and Rails releases with minimal downtime.

They also do frontend work. React is familiar to them, but they push clients toward Hotwire (Rails's native real-time framework) when it makes sense, arguing it simplifies architecture. They've built expertise in helping teams move away from React-heavy frontends where Hotwire covers the needs.

Workshops and mentoring round out the menu. They run sessions on Event Sourcing Workshop, Rails + Domain Driven Design, and Hotwire. Code mentoring is available too—they'll sit with your team and help them understand how to design and build complex systems. The teaching part is deliberate; Andrzej Krzywda maintains a blog since 2012, gives talks at major Ruby conferences (EuRuKo, RubyConf India, RubyConf Austria, RubyConf Thailand), and maintains Rails Event Store, an open-source event sourcing library that has 1.5k+ GitHub stars.

Architecturally, they specialize in event-driven systems and domain-driven design (DDD). This isn't theoretical—they've built and refactored real systems using event sourcing, CQRS, and process managers to handle complex business logic and concurrency issues that CRUD-based approaches can't solve well.

Notable work

Trezy, a fintech startup, came to Arkency with a real-time financial data problem. Their system struggled with unreliable webhook processing from third-party banking providers, transaction classification plagued by race conditions, and monthly-only cashflow reporting. Arkency proposed event sourcing. The result: fully reliable webhook ingestion with replayable history, deterministic transaction classification that eliminated inconsistencies, and cashflow reports expanded from monthly to daily, weekly, quarterly, and yearly—all available instantly.

Billetto, a Nordic event marketplace and ticketing platform, is a 12-year ongoing partnership. When Arkency started, Billetto had a large legacy codebase, high response times, and risky deployments that required maintenance windows. Arkency moved them to event-driven architecture, introduced background job processing (switching from Resque to Sidekiq), and built a custom EventStore that became the foundation for audit logs. The outcome: continuous deployment (every commit to production after tests pass), zero-downtime rolling deploys, response times cut by moving work to background jobs, and a small team of 4–6 developers now efficiently maintains the platform.

A legacy B2B ecommerce company (family-owned, global) needed stability and faster deployments. Arkency tightened observability (NewRelic), improved ERP-to-platform communication, refined deployment pipelines, and updated all dependencies. Rollback time dropped from 30 minutes to 3 minutes. Zero downtime achieved. A small three-person Arkency team worked alongside the client's internal staff.

How they work

Arkency operates on a "three pillars" philosophy: Anarchy (flexible hours, you set your own priorities), Async (no meetings; all communication is written and non-blocking), and Remote (work from anywhere). This shapes how they engage with clients too. You'll work with senior developers who talk directly to you about priorities and can set the direction of work—this isn't a body-shop model where junior developers wait for spec docs. They bill by project or dedicated team; exact pricing isn't public, but they're transparent that you get experienced people, not juniors. Projects span months to years (Billetto is 12 years running).

Team and credentials

Andrzej Krzywda founded the company and remains CEO. The founding team includes Marcin Domański (fullstack, since 2007), Jakub Kosiński (VP of Context Switching, since 2008), and others who've joined incrementally—Szymon Fiedler and Mirosław Pragłowski (2014), Maciej Korsan (UI, Hotwire speaker, 2021). The group totals about 12 senior developers based on the team page. They speak at major conferences, maintain open-source libraries, and publish extensively. Arkency scores 5/5 on Clutch. No ISO or SOC 2 certifications mentioned; no AWS/Microsoft/Google partner badges listed. Their credential is depth in Rails, event sourcing, and a long track record of shipping hard architectural work.