RustyBrick

What RustyBrick does

RustyBrick is a custom software firm in Rockland County, New York that has built websites and web applications since 1994. The company page states it grew from web software into iPhone and Android apps and branding work. The homepage lists five lines of work: visual identity and branding, websites, web applications, iOS and Android apps, and marketing strategy. The site also mentions e-commerce, SEO, and logo design.

The team is in-house. The company page states RustyBrick never outsources, and the team page names at least twelve people with roles, from the two founders through lead PHP, iOS, and Android developers, a designer, and a project manager. Tenures run long, with staff who joined in 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 still listed, plus a web developer hired in early 2025.

RustyBrick also builds its own products. ShulCloud, its cloud-based synagogue management software, passed 400 active synagogues in April 2016 and 613 active subscribers by July 2017, according to the agency's press releases. The firm has published Siddur, Tehillim, and Minyan Now prayer apps and runs an annual Global Bedtime Shema Night initiative, which signals a strong Jewish community focus alongside commercial work.

Pricing and engagement

RustyBrick does not publish rates, minimums, or packages, and the directory listing records no hourly rate. The company vision page invites calls about pricing at the toll-free number 877-GO-RUSTY, and the contact page lists an office at 250 West Nyack Road, Suite 200.

The process page describes six steps: clarify the business challenge, construct a plan, design a look and feel, build the site, refine it based on user input, and maintain it. Maintenance is sold through what the agency calls economical maintenance contracts. RustyBrick also ships a Self-Maintenance Module, its own content management tool, so clients can make changes without going back to the developers.

Engagements appear to run for years. Press releases describe building on the Intac Actuarial Services software over several years and integrating a Midpoint Trade Books back-office system the agency had designed years earlier with a cloud accounting product.

Who should hire RustyBrick

The strongest fit is an organization that needs a custom back-office or line-of-business system rather than a template site. The published work is dominated by that kind of project: order management for a flooring distributor, actuarial billing, vocational services tracking for a community council, and a custom CMS for a financial publisher.

• Synagogues and Jewish community organizations, given ShulCloud, the Mikveh operations product, and the JCCGCI vocational services system.
• Businesses in the New York region that want an in-person, non-outsourced team with a 30-year track record.
• Companies that need a native iOS or Android app tied to a custom backend, such as the Vidit video app, the CIBT StaffTracker app, or the WordStream PPC University app.
• Clients with QuickBooks, payment processor, or legacy system integration needs, all of which the technologies page lists.

Who should look elsewhere

RustyBrick's stack is PHP, MySQL, Laravel, and Zend on the web side and Objective-C and Swift on mobile. The technologies page also lists ASP, Perl, ColdFusion, and Adobe Flash, and the company page still says the firm has been building for over 20 years. Teams that want React, a modern TypeScript stack, or a design-led agency will find little evidence of that here.

• Buyers who need pricing before a call. No rates or minimums are published.
• Large enterprises that need a big delivery team. The directory listing records 10 to 49 staff and the team page names at least twelve.
• Companies that want recent public case studies. The newest press release on the site is dated December 2018, and the blog's latest posts are from October 2023.

Track record and signals

The site carries 25 pages of dated press releases. Advanced Flooring received a web-based order management system in February 2018, and the directory's case study summary reports a 15 percent gain in driver efficiency and a 30 percent shorter delivery-to-invoice cycle. RustyBrick built the DateCodeGenie Android tablet food safety system for National Checking Company in January 2015 and a second version in May 2017. It launched the GiftJoy Alexa skill with 110 Ventures in December 2018.

Other named work includes a custom CMS replacing multiple Joomla instances for Financial Advisors Magazine, a full rebrand and back-office rebuild for the National Soccer Coaches Association of America, the FM Home Loans website with mortgage and rent-versus-buy calculators in August 2016, the Omni Therapist scheduling app, the Search Engine Roundtable app for iOS, Android, and Apple Watch, and the ArtScroll Wasserman Siddur app. The directory listing also names HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, and Emergency Medical Associates as clients.

Three client quotes appear on the company page, from NSCAA, Pitney Bowes, and Emergency Medical Associates, and the directory records a 4.7 Google rating across 82 reviews. CEO Barry Schwartz is also the founder of Search Engine Roundtable and news editor of Search Engine Land, which gives the firm visibility in the search industry. The 12 Hacker News threads found in research all cite his SEO reporting or Twitter account and say nothing about hiring the agency.

How RustyBrick compares

Against other US software agencies in this directory, RustyBrick is older than nearly all of them and smaller than most, with no published rate to compare. Peers tend to market a modern JavaScript stack and a design process, while RustyBrick markets longevity, an in-house PHP team, and integration work.

Its differences are the 30-year history, the owned products such as ShulCloud, and the CEO's profile in search marketing. Its gaps are the absence of pricing, a site with few recent updates, and a technology list that mixes current tools with dated ones.