Why Appetizer Labs

IT Consulting Is Broken

Let me be blunt: traditional IT consulting is a business model built on dependency. Not on results.

You know the drill. A big consulting firm sends you three juniors with polished slide decks. They need six weeks of onboarding — on your dime. Then they write a concept. Then a concept for the concept. And eventually, months later, maybe there’s an MVP. Which then needs to be maintained by a different team, because the original crew already moved on to the next client.

I’ve seen this from the inside for 15 years. As a freelancer, as a consultant, as the guy who sweeps up the mess after the big consulting house has left the building.

What Drives Me Up the Wall

Body leasing, not engineering. Most IT service providers sell headcount, not solutions. The game is placing as many consultants as possible at a client for as long as possible. Whether they’re any good? Secondary. Whether the project succeeds? Not their KPI.

Buzzword bingo instead of substance. “Digital Transformation,” “Cloud Journey,” “Agile@Scale” — I can’t stand these terms anymore. Not because the concepts are bad, but because they’ve been hollowed out into marketing shells. A workshop with sticky notes is not a transformation.

Vendor lock-in as a business model. Why keep it simple when you can make it complicated? The more dependent the client, the longer the contract. That’s not a bug — it’s a feature. For the consultant.

Zero ownership. The project goes live, the team disappears, and you’re left with a codebase nobody on your staff understands. Support? Sure — at double the day rate.

Why Appetizer Labs Exists

I founded Appetizer Labs because I can do better. Not more modestly — more honestly.

We’re a cloud-native engineering consultancy based in Rhede, Münsterland — that’s rural northwest Germany. Not a Berlin hipster startup, not a Frankfurt consulting conglomerate. We’re engineers who build software that works in production.

Our approach is simple:

We solve problems, not contracts.
We build things your team can operate afterward.
We tell you when you don’t need something — even if that means less revenue for us.
We use a modern stack because it’s better, not because it’s trendy.

What We Do Differently

Outcomes Over Hours

I don’t care whether a problem takes 10 hours or 100 hours. What matters is: Does it work? Is it maintainable? Can your team work with it? We measure ourselves by outcomes, not timesheets.

Knowledge Transfer Is Mandatory

Every project has a built-in expiry date — and that’s a good thing. When we leave, your team needs to be able to carry everything forward on their own. Documentation, pair programming, workshops — that’s not an add-on, it’s part of the deal.

Honest Advice

Sometimes the right answer is: “You don’t need this.” Sometimes it’s: “You’re not ready for that yet.” And sometimes it’s: “We could do this, but company XY would do it better.” I have no problem being honest. My business model isn’t built on dependency.

Cloud-Native, but Pragmatic

Yes, we do Kubernetes. Yes, we do Go. Yes, we do Infrastructure as Code. But not because it sounds cool — because for most use cases it’s the better solution. If a simple VPS is enough, we’ll tell you that too.

Who We Work With

Our sweet spot is mid-market companies in the DACH region who know they’re behind on modernization — but don’t know where to start.

Maybe you have a monolithic Java application that’s been running on a dedicated server for 10 years. You have an ops team that deploys manually. You’ve heard that “cloud” is the future, but every proposal you get sounds like a million-euro project.

That’s exactly our thing.

We start small. We look at what you have, what you need, and what the shortest path from A to B is. No 200-page concept document. No 18-month project plan. Instead: What’s the first container, the first CI/CD pipeline, the first step that saves you time tomorrow?

The Promise

I can’t promise that every project will go perfectly. Shit happens. But I can promise:

Honesty. You’ll always get my real assessment, not what you want to hear.
Quality. Code that works in production. Not demo-ware.
Ownership. We stand behind what we build. Even after go-live.
Respect. For your budget, your time, and your team.

Sound like what you’re looking for? Let’s talk. No sales pitch, no slide deck — just an honest conversation about where you are and where you want to go.

Appetizer Labs. Engineering, no bullshit.