About ChatStack

ChatStack is a product of App Developer Studio

ChatStack is published by App Developer Studio, a UK-registered company (Companies House number 13590871) that has been designing, building and shipping production software for global clients for more than a decade. We are an Official FlutterFlow Expert Agency — one of only a handful in the world — and Shopify and AWS Expert Partners. Our team has delivered 140+ apps for 50+ clients in 25 countries across 5 continents, from venture-backed startups to publicly listed enterprises.

We built ChatStack because we lived the problem. After years of translating fuzzy product ideas into shipped apps, we knew that what AI coding tools really need is structured, machine-readable context — not another chat thread. ChatStack is that context layer, productised.

Meet our founder

Rob Maclean — Founder & CEO

Rob is British, an Oxford University Masters graduate, and has spent more than 20 years in product management, enterprise software solution design and financial services before founding App Developer Studio. He has personally shipped multiple award-winning consumer and B2B apps and brings a commercial discipline to every project: cost management, quality, predictable delivery, and long-term partnerships.

Under Rob's leadership, the company has won categories at the MTN App of the Year (2022, 2023), the FNB App of the Year (2024), the Africa Tech Awards (2024), and grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Mozilla Responsible AI Challenge.

Connect with Rob on LinkedIn

Senior leadership

ChatStack is built by an experienced leadership team that combines deep engineering, design and delivery expertise.

Rob Maclean

Founder & CEO

Devin Florentino

CTO

Amy-Leigh Braaf

Head of UX/UI

Amanda Kaburise

Business Development Manager

The full team behind ChatStack

Designers, developers, product managers, project managers, business analysts and testers — all working together to ship high-quality software for our clients.

Rob Maclean

Founder & CEO

Amanda Kaburise

Business Development Manager

Xirimbi Baloyi

Senior Product Manager

Deepa Naran

Senior Project Manager

Mark Gibson

Project Manager

Amy-Leigh Braaf

Head of UX/UI

Devin Florentino

CTO

Mabote Chobokoane

Intermediate Developer

Mikael Rademeyer

Intermediate Developer

Edwin Tlhako

Intermediate Developer

Zimvo Matwa

Developer

Pride Mkhabela

Developer

Dhannya Mathew

UI/UX Designer and Business Analyst

Mishack Segooa

Intermediate UX/UI Designer & Graphic Designer

Kenny Belau

Intermediate UX & UI Designer

Minette Gericke

Intermediate UX/UI Designer

Marco Chu

Intermediate UX/UI Designer

Trusted by global brands

Our clients include venture-backed startups, household consumer brands, financial services groups and global enterprises.

Awards & recognition

Our work — and the work of the AI products we build with our clients — has been recognised by some of the world's most respected technology, AI and innovation award bodies.

• 2024Africa Tech Awards — AI Award
  Project: GRIT / Zuzi
• 2024FNB App of the Year — Best Enterprise App
  Project: Eyerus
• 2024AIconics Award — Winner
  Project: Kwanele ChatGBV
• 2023MTN App of the Year — Most Innovative App
  Project: Eyerus
• 2023Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — Grant Winner
  Project: Kwanele ChatGBV
• 2023Mozilla Responsible AI Challenge — 2nd Place
  Project: Kwanele ChatGBV — Selected from 240+ global entries; $30,000 prize.
• 2023Tourism Innovation Award
  Project: Eyerus
• 2022MTN App of the Year — Category Winner
  Project: Eyerus
• 2021Global Brands Awards — Most Innovative Online Remittance App Developer
  Project: Mukuru

How we work — design-led, AI-first, full-stack

We are design-led, detail-orientated and commercially-minded. The single biggest reason apps fail is poor UX/UI and technical design — so we always start with research, design and prototyping (Figma and Stitch for early UI options). Over 95% of our own code is now AI-assisted; execution got cheaper, so we invest in requirements first — which is why ChatStack exists.

Delivery follows an AI-accelerated loop: ChatStack for structured requirements and estimates, Cursor for planning and build, MCP connections to Figma, Jira and Supabase, then PostHog, Patrol and Shakebug for observability and bugs, and Codemagic / Vercel for ship. Clients always own their IP. See the nine-phase playbook on Our Services or the full write-up on ADS app development.

Why we built ChatStack

ChatStack was developed to address the problems and unleash the potential of using AI platforms — based on our own hands-on experience shipping over 140 apps. Generic AI chat is fast at generating code, but slow at building the right thing. ChatStack fixes that by turning a product idea into a structured, machine-readable PRD that AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf) can act on directly via Model Context Protocol (MCP). See ChatStack MCP and the ChatGPT plugin.

We used it on ourselves first: ChatStack cut our own sales lead-to-conversion timeline from about two months to three weeks, and it is the Estimate and Planning layer of our delivery playbook.

Read what ChatStack is and how it works.

Work with us

Whether you want to generate a free PRD in minutes or have an experienced team build the product for you, we're ready.