Kent, Remote, Global: Running a Dev Business From Folkestone

I live in Folkestone. If you're not from the UK, that probably means nothing to you. If you are from the UK, you might know it as the town where the Channel Tunnel starts, or possibly as "that place in Kent that's trying to be cool now." Both are fair.

It's a coastal town in the south-east of England, about an hour from London by high-speed train. Population around 50,000. It has a nice creative quarter, some genuinely good restaurants for a town its size, and a harbour that looks spectacular when the weather cooperates — which, this being England, is about four months of the year.

I run a development consultancy from here. My clients are in London, across the UK, and increasingly global. Nobody has ever lost a project because I'm not sitting in a WeWork in Shoreditch.

Why Not London

I lived in London for a bit. Most people in the south-east do at some point. It's the gravitational pull of the UK economy — if you work in tech, finance, media, or law, London is where the "serious" work supposedly happens.

The thing about London is that it's excellent at extracting money from you. Rent that makes your eyes water. A pint that costs six quid. A commute that eats two hours of your day and a not insignificant portion of your soul. Networking events where everyone's trying to sell you something while pretending they're not.

I left because the maths stopped making sense. I was earning more, but spending more. Working more, but living less. The premium London charged for the privilege of being in London wasn't buying me anything I couldn't get elsewhere.

Folkestone was initially a compromise — close enough to get to London when needed, cheap enough to have a decent quality of life. It became a deliberate choice when I realised I almost never needed to get to London.

Remote Is the Default

I've worked remotely for years. Not because of COVID — that just made everyone else try it. For a developer, remote work is natural. My tools are a laptop, an internet connection, and a quiet room. None of those require a specific postcode.

A typical client engagement looks like this: initial call on Google Meet or Zoom. Requirements discussion over Slack or email. Development on my machine, pushed to GitHub, reviewed asynchronously. Deployment automated. Questions handled in real-time via Slack during working hours.

At no point does a client benefit from me being physically nearby. The code doesn't care where I am when I write it. The deployment doesn't know my postcode. The tests pass or fail regardless of whether I'm in Folkestone or Finsbury Park.

I've had exactly two clients in five years ask me to be on-site regularly. One was a bank with security requirements that mandated it — fair enough, I declined. The other just preferred face-to-face and was happy to pay for the train ticket. I went up once a fortnight for a few months. It was fine. The high-speed train means London is an hour away, which is less time than most Londoners spend commuting from zone 4.

The London Client Reality

Most of my clients are London-based companies. They don't care where I am — they care whether I deliver. And that's the point.

When you're a developer, your location is irrelevant but your availability matters. I'm responsive during business hours. I join calls when scheduled. I deploy during their working day so issues get caught quickly. From their perspective, I'm "there" — just not physically.

The London agencies I compete with charge London rates, pay London rents, and have London overheads. Their developers commute for an hour, sit in an open-plan office getting interrupted, commute home for another hour, and do their actual focused work in whatever time is left. I start work at 8am in a quiet office, put in a solid focused day, and stop at a reasonable time.

I'm not cheaper than London agencies — I don't compete on price, and I wouldn't recommend anyone does. But my overhead is lower, which means I don't need to churn through projects or oversell capacity to keep the lights on. I can take on work I find interesting, say no to work I don't, and maintain the quality that keeps clients coming back.

Global Clients, Real Timezones

The remote model scales beyond the UK. I've worked with clients in Europe, North America, and Australia. Timezones are the only real constraint, and they're manageable:

European clients: Basically the same timezone. No adjustment needed.
US East Coast: Five hours behind. Morning overlap from their 9am to my 2pm. Enough for calls and discussions. I do focused work in my morning, collaborative work in the afternoon.
US West Coast: Eight hours behind. This is trickier. We get maybe two hours of overlap. It works for async-heavy projects but not for ones needing constant back-and-forth.
Australia: Effectively no overlap. I've made it work, but only on projects where async communication is truly the default and nobody expects real-time responses.

The trick is setting expectations upfront. "Here are my working hours. Here's when we overlap. Here's how quickly I respond to messages during working hours. Here's the response time outside of them." Clients who need 24/7 availability need a team, not a solo developer. Clients who need reliable, high-quality work during defined hours — that's what I offer.

The Folkestone Life

I'm not going to pretend Folkestone is paradise. The high street has some empty units. The weather is English. The nightlife is "there are some pubs." If you're looking for the cultural output of London or Manchester, you'll be disappointed.

But I can walk to the sea in ten minutes. My daughter goes to a good school. My mortgage is a fraction of what a London flat would cost. I have an office — a whole room, in my house, with a door that closes — which is a luxury most London developers in house shares can only dream of.

The creative quarter is genuinely interesting. There's an art scene, driven partly by the Creative Foundation's investment. There are independent shops, decent coffee, a few proper restaurants. It's not London, but it's not trying to be. It's a small town with enough going on that you don't feel isolated.

For a developer who works remotely, the town you live in needs to provide three things: a reliable internet connection, a reasonable cost of living, and enough life outside work that you don't go stir-crazy. Folkestone delivers on all three.

The Human Behind the Code

I'm writing this article because I think it matters. Not the specific town — nobody needs to move to Folkestone. But the principle: you can run a successful development business from wherever you want to live, rather than wherever the industry tells you to live.

Every client I've worked with hired me because of my skills, my track record, and my communication. Not one of them hired me because of my postcode. The ones who care about location — and there are some — aren't my clients. That's fine. There are enough people who care about quality to keep me busy.

I chose where I want to live, then built a career that works from there. Not the other way round. That might sound like a small thing, but it's the difference between a career that serves your life and a life that serves your career.

The code is the same wherever you write it. The quality is the same. The commitment is the same. The only thing that changes is whether you can see the sea from your office window.

I can. It's quite nice.

I've been building web products for 16 years. If you need a senior developer you can trust, get in touch.