Almost everything I have built so far is a consumer app: something a person downloads from a store and uses for themselves. This week went the other way. I built two apps for small businesses instead, and neither of them touches an app store. They run in a browser, on the business's own website, and that turns out to change everything about how they get made and sold.
A booking app that does not take a cut
The first is called Snug. It lets a small place take bookings directly on its own site. The problem it goes after is a quiet tax that independent guest houses and B&Bs pay every single month: the big booking sites skim fifteen to eighteen percent off the top of every reservation. For a four-room place that is real money, gone, on bookings the owner often sourced themselves.
Snug takes a small flat fee instead of a cut, so the owner keeps the booking. Along the way it grew a second personality. The same engine that books a room for two nights also books a place on a six-week course, so it now works for a dog-training academy just as well as a guest house. You can see both: a room booking and a class booking running live, each themed to a different business.
A menu the kitchen actually controls
The second is Carte, a digital menu for cafes and restaurants. A printed menu goes stale the moment a price changes or a dish sells out, and reprinting costs money every time. Worse, UK food law requires every dish to declare its allergens, and a flat PDF behind a QR code does nothing to help a nervous diner actually find what they can safely eat.
Carte carries the fourteen named allergens on every dish, so a diner can tap once to hide anything they react to. When something sells out, the kitchen marks it gone and it vanishes from the menu instantly. The live demo is a seaside cafe, photos and all.
The demo is half the product
The honest lesson of the week is that building the app was the easy half. The hard half was making a business able to picture itself using one. A list of features convinces nobody. So instead of describing Snug and Carte, I wired them into mocked-up sites for real local trades and let them run for real: book a room, reserve a class, filter a menu by allergy. A working thing beats a brochure every time.
What I deliberately did not do is invent a price and pretend it is final. The pages say a small setup fee and a modest monthly, and leave the exact number to a conversation. I would rather under-promise on a page than over-promise on a call.
There is now a proper home for these so they are products in their own right, not a footnote on a web-design page. Two are live. The list is meant to get longer.