Built on
A platform is a constraint you live with for years, so it is chosen against what the site or the software actually has to do. Where something cheaper and simpler would carry the job, that is what we will recommend — including when it is not a platform we sell.
Ask which one fitsMeasurement · Google · Meta
GA4, Search Console, Google Ads and Meta, configured before a campaign runs, and in accounts that stay in your name.
Application · PHP / JavaScript
Where the requirement is an application rather than a site: portals, internal tools, integrations and scheduled automation.
Sanity · Contentful · Strapi
Content managed in one place and delivered to several: a site, an app, a partner feed. Paired with a Next.js or Astro front end.
eCommerce · Hosted
Hosted commerce where the platform carries the hosting, the security and the checkout, and you carry a monthly fee.
eCommerce · WordPress
WordPress commerce for catalogues where the rules are yours, unusual pricing, bundles, or a shop that has to live inside a content site.
CMS · PHP
The right answer for most marketing and content sites: your team can edit it, hosting is cheap, and the ecosystem means very little has to be built twice.
Against what the site or the software actually has to do, and against who has to maintain it afterwards. A platform is a constraint you live with for years; the cost of choosing the familiar one is usually paid in year two.
A page builder is quick to start and expensive to leave. A headless stack on a single marketing site buys flexibility nobody needs and costs editing simplicity. And if a $30-a-month product does most of what a custom build would, buying it and living with the gap is almost always cheaper. Each of those costs us revenue to say, and each of them is true.
Almost every platform argument is really an argument about the next three years. The build cost differs by a little; the cost of owning the result differs by a lot, and it is decided by things nobody demonstrates in a pitch — how many dependencies the site inherits, whether the client can edit it without a developer, and what happens at the first major update.
So each of these pages says what the platform is genuinely good at and, more usefully, where it stops being the right answer. A recommendation that never includes the second half is a sales pitch.
See website development for how a build runs, or custom software development when the requirement is an application rather than a site.
Two questions settle most platform arguments before they start: how many people will need to change the site without a developer, and how many other systems it has to talk to. The answers usually point at one platform clearly enough that the rest of the debate is unnecessary.
Before you ask for a quote
A paragraph is enough to start. A person reads it and replies within one working day with a scope, a price and an honest view of whether the work is worth doing at all.
