Belgrade, Serbia — software production since 2004
Blazing
fast.
Unbreakable.
We know what a computer is. We know where the program runs. Twenty years of building from that knowledge — not from frameworks, not from shortcuts, not from anyone else's definition of what is good enough.
the origin
Two engineers.
One decision.
No safety net.
Older brother encountered the Internet in 1995. The recognition was instant and unsettling — an absolute certainty about the future. But he had to finish what he had started: a fundamental engineering degree in structural mechanics. Milan, five years younger, followed the same academic path and converged on automation and core programming — applied mathematics in its most futuristic form.
After graduation, both walked away from the guaranteed future that awaited talented young engineers in large companies. They chose to start from zero. PHP and Linux were emerging. MySQL from the terminal — not Microsoft's click-and-run world — was the right path. The hard path. The only path worth taking.
Pixel is huge.
kB is a lot.
No money for photographers, no money for designers — so they learned both, by necessity, to a professional level. No shortcuts. No external help. Every project was not just a source of income — it was a training ground. Learning and practice were the operating doctrine. Over and over, without exception.
First contact
Aleksandar encounters the internet. An immediate, unsettling recognition of the future arrives — five years before he can act on it.
Starting from zero
Work begins on written-off IBM computers bought from banks, one step from the recycling bin. Every project funds the next skill. Hundreds of thousands of product photographs taken and processed by hand.
plumCMS — first release
Rudimentary. But it worked. The obsession: faster, faster, more reliable. The bloom would take another ten years of development and struggle.
plumDesign founded
The agency is officially registered in Belgrade. An independent software production studio. No templates. No compromises. No borrowed identity.
First real hardware
The first truly powerful computer — earned, not borrowed. Professional Nikon gear follows. No photographer needed: they became one.
plumFramework standards
Formal procedures for adopting new technologies are established. CeBIT in this period is the annual window to the future — books, magazines, travel reinvested before anything else.
why we are called plum
The
Rakija
Principle.
Rakija is the only Serbian product that German customs officers wave through without hesitation — sometimes in reused bottles, which is technically forbidden — with just one whispered question: "Is it good?"
The highest quality rakija cannot be industrialised. It is produced using centuries-old primitive technology, in a domestic environment, one barrel per day maximum. Quality at that level is inseparable from the human hand that made it.
That is the exact
software we set out
to make.
Unique. Impossible to industrialise. Made in Belgrade, in the chaos and permanent noise of a city that never quite settles — blazing fast, unbeatable engineering that passes every border and breaks every rule that must be broken, forged carefully, without ever harming anyone.
engineering philosophy
question one
Do you know
what the
computer is?
the answer
A machine for
transforming
the symbols.
question two
Do you know
where the program
runs inside it?
the answer
A filtered projection
sequence of states
of all components
in time.
matters.
Most software developers work at the surface. They assemble frameworks and push code without ever asking what the machine is actually doing. The result is software that is slow, brittle, and insecure — not because the developers are careless, but because they do not know what they are standing on.
At plumDesign, we know what we are standing on. We have understood these two questions since we started — as mechanical engineers, as mathematicians, as people who learned every layer of the stack by necessity, not by choice. That understanding is not a philosophy we adopted. It is the reason plumDesign exists.
It is why our software is faster. It is why AVIRAL and fireGATE were designed the way they were — not just as security tools, but as systems that understand the machine they are protecting. Pixel is huge. kB is a lot. Every symbol transformation matters.
a definition of current AI — derived from the same framework
An AI language model is a filtered projection of recorded human symbol transformations, compressed into a statistical weight space, producing at each step the most contextually coherent next symbol.
The same framework that defines program execution defines AI — because both are symbol-transforming machines. The difference: AI produces the statistically most coherent next symbol. It reasons. It does not think. Thinking requires the capacity to be genuinely dissatisfied with an answer and to refuse to move on until a better one is found. That capacity is not in the weights.
the people
Aleksandar Jovanović
Co-founder · Information Architecture · Design · Photography
Mechanical engineer by training, with academic background in structural engineering, FEA, and mathematical modelling. The internet found him in 1995 and never let go. He taught himself photography, graphic design, and information architecture — because there was no money to pay anyone else, and because doing it himself was the only way to do it correctly. The rakija principle is his formulation.
Milan Jovanović
Co-founder · Software Architecture · Automation · Core Engineering
Mechanical engineer specialising in automation, with deep roots in core programming and applied mathematics. Five years junior followed the same instinct toward the hard path — and accelerated. The technical precision of plumFramework is his. His background in automation means predictable, stable and sustainable solutions are allowed.
who trusts us
Client since 2002
HERZ Armaturen GmbH
One of the earliest clients. Dr. Gerhard Glinzerer was among the first to recognise what plumDesign was capable of — and backed that potential at a moment when it mattered most. A relationship built on mutual recognition that has never needed to be renegotiated. Still active. Still trusted. Over two decades later.
Active partnership: 20+ years
Client since 2006
Vaillant GmbH
Twenty years of a small Belgrade team navigating the structured IT infrastructure of a global corporation — and surviving entirely on their own terms. A sustained, unequal contest that plumDesign has never lost. They hardly accept our breaking of the rules. We keep breaking them, because the results are unambiguous. Quality is the only argument that has never needed repeating.
Active partnership: 18+ years
security suite
360°
Security.
No gaps.
Most security products protect one surface. plumDesign's security suite seals both: what tries to get in, and what may already be there. Two products. One unified activation. One shared intelligence layer. Zero redundancy.
Built for the LAMP stack. Deployed at the Apache level. Designed to stop attacks before a single line of PHP is ever executed — 10× faster than software-only solutions, because the block happens before the application even starts.
external gatekeeper · traffic firewall
fireGATE
plumWall — The Sentinel at the Gate
fireGATE stands between the open internet and your application. It does not just block known bad IPs — it reads intent. Every incoming request is scored against a heuristic rule engine. SQLi payloads, XSS attempts, burst crawlers, botnet subnets — all stopped before they reach your database, before they reach your PHP, before they reach anything.
- ▸Heuristic firewall — scans URL params, POST data, User-Agent, Referrer
- ▸Risk scoring engine — customisable regex rules with point thresholds
- ▸Subnet heat-mapping — detects /24 range attacks, auto-merges to block entire subnets
- ▸.htaccess sync — moves blocking to Apache layer, 10× faster than PHP interception
- ▸Forensic tools — DNSBL checks, GeoIP, burst analyser, multi-gigabyte log processor
- ▸SQLi & XSS auto-block — payloads detected and dropped before any execution
product catalogue
plumCAT
The most powerful product catalogue on the platform
Managing thousands of products across dozens of markets in dozens of languages is not a CMS problem. It is an engineering problem. plumCAT was built by people who spent years processing hundreds of thousands of product photographs by hand, organising vast data structures for global corporate clients, and learning precisely what breaks at scale.
Nothing in plumCAT was designed for the average use case. It was designed for the edge — where volume is extreme, structure is complex, and the cost of a slow or broken catalogue is measured in lost contracts, not lost visitors.
Prices, descriptions, categories — independently manageable per locale.
Extreme-speed entry
Individual or bulk product upload. Designed for teams handling thousands of SKUs without friction or delay.
Multi-hierarchy categories
Products categorised across one or more independent hierarchical structures simultaneously.
Per-market assortments
Different product sets, different prices, different languages — from one admin. No duplication of effort.
Controlled filtering engine
Exceptionally efficient and controlled search and filtering across the full catalogue depth.
Product relationships
Easy linking of related, complementary, and substitute products across category boundaries.
Promotional logic
New arrivals, on-sale products, featured highlights — all surfaced and managed from within the catalogue.
page builder
plumPAGE
Fast page delivery under complete control. plumPAGE is not a drag-and-drop toy — it is a precision publishing tool that puts complex internet pages into production quickly, without surrendering structural or performance control to a third-party framework that may not exist in five years.
Built on plumFramework. Responsive generation is automatic. Every page is built to the same performance standard: lean, fast, and correct. No bloated front-end dependencies. No runtime surprises. The page works — on every device, in every language, at any volume.
- Page creation and editing — no FTP required at any stage
- PHP-ready — write custom PHP programs directly inside plum(x)
- jQuery / JS editor built in — full scripting without leaving the platform
- CSS editor — write and override styles directly in the platform
- Automatic mobile version — responsive generation from a single build
- External media server connectivity — offload assets, maintain performance
- Multilingual pages — as easy and intuitive as single-language
also in the platform
plumEM
Email marketing — integrated with the same content and data layer.
plumCRM
Multi-purpose CRM — client management from within the platform.
Every symbol
matters.
"Like the best rakija, plumDesign cannot be industrialised. One project. One barrel. Human hands at every step. Made in Belgrade — and it passes every border."
Every
project.
Individual.
No templates. No shortcuts. No mass production.
Tell us what you need. We will build it — correctly.
