İKAsistan is a Turkish HR platform we designed, built and run ourselves. It takes the paperwork that sits between an HR professional and their actual job — employment contracts, severance calculations, payroll, disciplinary letters, meeting minutes — and turns each one into a guided tool that produces a document compliant with Turkish labour law.
We are including it here because it is the clearest answer to a fair question: can an agency that maintains other people’s websites actually build and operate software? This is a live product with paying customers, and everything below can be checked at ikasistani.com.
The problem it addresses
Turkish employment law is specific and unforgiving. İş Kanunu No. 4857 sets out how severance and notice pay are calculated, what an employment contract must contain, and what makes a termination lawful. Get a calculation wrong and the employer can end up in court.
Most small and mid-sized companies handle this with a mix of spreadsheets, downloaded templates of unknown provenance, and expensive one-off legal advice for documents that are essentially standard. The work is repetitive, the stakes are high, and the tooling is poor.
What we built
Nine tools, each doing one job properly:
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| Employee records | Central register with contract and salary data |
| Payroll calculator | Gross↔net, cumulative tax tracking, current SGK parameters |
| Severance & notice | İş Kanunu formulas across six termination types, with ceiling checks |
| Employment contracts | Full Turkish contracts including all mandatory clauses |
| Warning & termination letters | Five document types with legal grounding |
| Interview kits | Competency questions, scoring rubric, red-flag list |
| Meeting minutes | Raw notes into formal minutes with decisions and action items |
| Job adverts | Formatted for five Turkish job platforms |
| Employee release forms | Structured to Yargıtay precedent, with the 30-day rule checked |
The calculators are deterministic — payroll and severance follow the statutory formulas, not a language model. AI is used where it genuinely helps, which is drafting prose: contracts, letters, minutes and interview material. Keeping that line clear matters. Nobody should be told their severance figure by something that occasionally invents numbers.
Engineering decisions worth explaining
Compliance at the database layer, not the application layer. KVKK is Turkey’s data protection law, and HR data is about as sensitive as business data gets. Access control is enforced with Postgres row-level security in Supabase, so a user’s rows are unreachable even if application code has a bug. Four migrations exist purely to define and tighten those policies. Putting the rule in the database rather than in a middleware check means there is one place to audit and no code path that can accidentally bypass it.
Hosted close to its users. The application runs on Vercel in the Frankfurt region. For a product used entirely from Turkey, that is the nearest sensible point of presence, and it keeps round trips short on a form-heavy application.
Search built into the architecture, not added afterwards. The application is 60 pages, and a substantial number of those are landing pages targeting the specific phrases Turkish HR staff actually search — kıdem tazminatı hesaplama, bordro hesaplama programı, ihtar mektubu örneği. Each one is a real page with a real tool on it, not a doorway. This is the same discipline we apply to client sites: the structure is the SEO work, and it is far cheaper to design it in at the start than to retrofit it.
Free tier metered, not crippled. The calculators are unlimited even on the free plan, because they are cheap to run and they are what earns trust. What is metered is the AI document generation, which has a real per-call cost. Pricing follows the cost structure rather than being arbitrary.
Scale of the build
| Pages | 60 |
| API routes | 38 |
| Database migrations | 20 |
| HR tools | 9 |
| Interface language | Turkish throughout |
What we take from it
Two things carry directly into client work.
The first is that compliance is an architecture decision. KVKK, GDPR and their equivalents are much easier to satisfy when the constraint is expressed in the data layer at the start than when it is a retrofit across an existing codebase.
The second is that SEO is structural. The reason a tool page can rank is that it is genuinely the page a searcher wanted, with a working tool on it and a URL that says so. That is a build-time decision, not a content-marketing one.
İKAsistan is live at ikasistani.com. Everything described here — the tools, the pricing, the compliance claims — is visible on the product itself.