Our own heaviest problem was the usual one. A business needs a shopfront, a way to handle enquiries, and an office to run the paperwork. We built all three the way we build for clients, so this write-up sits here with the others, and you’re standing in the middle of it.
Nine
live on the site, two with AI inside
None
which is why there's no banner
One
public site, tools and back office
Fictional
real records never leave the server
A small business needs the same machinery as a big one. Somewhere to be found, proof behind the claims, a pipeline for enquiries, proposals that look the part, and contract deadlines that get remembered. The off-the-shelf answer is a subscription for each: a website builder, a form service, a CRM, a document tool. That monthly sprawl is exactly what we tell clients to avoid, so charging into it ourselves seemed a poor start.
The site you’re reading is the first half of the build. Alongside the pages there’s a publishing system for the blog and these case studies, and an enquiry form that stores only what you choose to tell us. Nine free tools run as live demos of the kind of thing we make, and seven of them are ordinary code, because that’s all their jobs needed.
It’s also built the way we say software should be. There are no tracking cookies and no analytics scripts, which is why you never saw a cookie banner. The one cookie on the whole site keeps the administrator signed in. Rate-limiting records, the only place an IP address ever lands, delete themselves within a day.
Behind a login sits the system that runs the business. An inbox where enquiries get qualified or dismissed. A drag-and-drop pipeline with pound values, days-in-stage counters and quote-expiry warnings. Client records with a running timeline of every note and event. And an engagement workspace that assembles proposals and reports as print-ready documents, tracking each job from quote through delivery to the end of its warranty.
The clocks matter most. Our contracts have real deadlines in them, such as quote expiry, the acceptance window and the warranty period, and a contract term nobody tracks is decoration. So the system owns the clocks and counts them down. None of it was built ahead of need: each part arrived when its process first ran for real, which is the same rule we apply to client work.
There’s one more trick. Prospects sometimes ask to see the back office, so it has a demo mode. Flip it on and every screen shows seeded, fictional firms; every click writes to fictional records; real rows never leave the server. A demo cannot reveal real client data because the data never makes the journey.
AI appears where it earns its place and nowhere else. Two of the public tools use it, for the jobs that need reading and judgement. In the office it drafts the build specification for a new job, working from what the system already knows about the deal and the notes on file. The draft lands in the editor unsaved. A human reads it, fixes it and decides what gets kept, which is the same rule we put in everything we ship.
We were the easiest client we will ever have. No discovery call, no handover, and the requirements lived in the builder’s head. Every real project carries friction this one never met, which is why the other case studies on this page matter more than this one: they show the approach surviving contact with actual clients.
And the whole thing is a shop window, tools included. You’re reading its case study from inside it, written by the people who built it. Season to taste, then go and poke at the free tools, which make the argument better than we can.