special requests
Beyond the standard plan
Sometimes a website isn't the thing you need.
The $30 plan is for a business that needs to be found: your menu, your hours, your prices, your phone number. If what you have in mind is a booking system, a platform, a tool your staff would use every day, or a game, that is different work, and it deserves a proper conversation rather than a price list.
the kind of thing
People come to me with all sorts,
and quite a lot of it is buildable.
A rough idea of what fits here. If yours isn't on the list, that isn't a no. It just means we should talk.
Booking and ordering
- Take reservations without paying a commission on every cover
- Order-ahead and in-store pickup for a shop or kitchen
- Appointment booking for a salon, garage or practice
- Tickets or places for classes, tastings and events
Platforms and tools
- A members' or customers' area behind a login
- A directory or marketplace connecting two sides
- An internal tool that replaces a spreadsheet nobody trusts
- A dashboard that pulls your numbers into one place
Games and the unusual
- A browser game, a playable promotion or a prototype
- An interactive map, quiz or configurator
- Something for a museum, festival or exhibition
- An idea you cannot quite classify. Bring it anyway
how it goes
No surprises, in either direction.
You describe the problem
Tell me what is going wrong rather than what you think should be built. What is slow, what is costing you money, what you find yourself doing by hand every week. An email or a phone call is enough to start.
I tell you straight
I'll say if I am the right person for it. I'll also say if something off the shelf would do the job better and cost you less, and roughly what building this would involve. If the honest answer is "don't build this", you will get it.
A written scope and a fixed price
Before any work starts you get what it does, what it does not do, when it lands and what it costs. You see it as it is built, not at the end.
what it costs
Quoted per project, honestly.
This work is not $30 a month and I will not pretend otherwise. A small, well-defined build is a one-time fee. Something you will keep running and changing usually works better as a build fee plus an ongoing arrangement for hosting and upkeep. That runs the same way the standard plan does, at a level that matches the thing.
So you can work out whether it's worth starting the conversation: a small, well-defined build (one clear job, a handful of screens, no unusual plumbing) is usually $1,200 to $3,500. What moves it inside that range, or above it, is how much still has to be worked out rather than decided, how many moving parts there are (payments, logins, talking to a system you already use), and how much existing data has to be brought across. Ongoing hosting and upkeep, if the thing needs it, is quoted next to that figure and agreed at the same time.
The real figure is fixed in writing, with the scope, before any work starts.
What is always true
- The scope and the price are written down before anything starts
- You are told if an existing product would do it better and cheaper
- No commitment is asked for during the conversation
- Talking it through costs you nothing
What I will turn down
- Work that genuinely needs a team, where one person would let you down
- Anything handling medical, financial or otherwise regulated data
- A rebuild of something you already get for free elsewhere
- A deadline I do not believe I can meet
Saying no to the wrong project is how I stay able to look after the right ones.
Tell me what you're trying to do.
A paragraph is plenty. What the thing would do, who would use it, and roughly when you need it. I will reply with an honest view of whether it is worth building and whether I am the right person to build it.