A few days ago I wrote that I had built two web apps for local businesses and that the list was meant to get longer. It got longer. There are five now, and I want to write down what they are while the run of building them is still fresh, because they were made to work as a set.
The idea behind all of them is the same. A small business pays a quiet tax somewhere, or loses something it never sees, and a simple web app can stop the bleeding without an app store, a big monthly bill, or a server the owner has to think about. Each one lives on the business's own site, themed to look like theirs, and I host and run the lot.
The three new ones
Slate is online appointment booking. The booking phone never stops, and every call missed mid-haircut is a booking that might not come back. Slate lets people pick a slot themselves, day or night, around the opening hours, service lengths and staff of the business. The clever part is the bit you do not see: it works out which times are genuinely free and never offers one that would clash, so two people can never grab the same chair. Booked while you work, no double-bookings, no marketplace skimming a cut.
Tally is the coffee-shop stamp card, reborn on the phone. The little cardboard one works right up until it goes through the wash, and even when it survives it tells the owner nothing. Tally lives in the customer's phone, fills with a tap, and gives the owner the one thing a paper card never could: a list of who their regulars actually are.
Nudge is about reviews, and it fixes a genuinely unfair bit of maths. The customer who had a perfect visit walks out happy and never posts about it. The one who had a bad day goes straight home and writes a one-star, because annoyance is a stronger motivator than contentment. Nudge asks one question after a visit and routes the answer: a happy customer gets a one-tap path to leave a public review while the good feeling is fresh, and an unhappy one gets a private line straight to the owner, who can put it right before it ever goes public.
Why a set
On their own each of these is a small thing. Together they start to look like the software a high-street business actually runs on: take the booking, show the menu, fill the diary, reward the regular, earn the review. Bookings, menus, appointments, loyalty and reputation, all from one studio, all embeddable with a single line of code, none of it needing an app anyone has to download.
I did not invent prices for any of them on the page. A small setup fee, a modest monthly, and the real number left to a conversation. What I would rather do is show a business the working thing and let it picture itself using it, which is the whole reason every one of these has a live demo you can poke at right now.
Five tools. The list can still get longer.