I've been building fivedaylaunch for the past couple of months. This is my first DEV post, so figured I'd share what we're doing and what I've been learning.
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The idea
Local service businesses — plumbers, salons, cafes, dentists, photographers — usually end up in one of two bad spots:
- Try Wix/Squarespace and give up after two weekends because they don't have time to learn a builder, or
- Pay a local agency $2,500–$8,000 upfront for a site that still looks generic
Neither is great. What we do instead: a real hand-designed website + owner portal delivered in 5 business days, starting at $25/mo. No upfront fee, no annual contract.
If you want to see it, try /instant — put a business name in and you get a real preview site in 60 seconds. No signup, no card.
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The tech stack (probably more interesting to this crowd)
Server: Node.js + Express (customer portal) + a small Python service for AI-assisted content generation #
DB: SQLite with WAL mode. Yes, in production. It's plenty for our current scale and eliminates a ton of ops overhead. #
Hosting: the whole thing runs on a single 2 GB DigitalOcean droplet right now (~$12/mo). We'll horizontally scale when we outgrow it, not before. #
AI: Claude Haiku for the daily content pipeline, with a template + heuristic fallback when determinism matters more than creativity #
Front-end: hand-written HTML/CSS with a schema-driven templating layer. No React, no build step, no bundler. Ships in ~15 kB per page.
Deliberately unfancy. When your daily customer volume is measured in the tens, boring tech is the correct choice.
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What I'll be writing about here
- Small-business tech stack decisions
- SQLite in production (I'll die on this hill)
- AEO / GEO — getting your product cited by ChatGPT / Claude / Perplexity, which is a different beast from classic SEO
- Build-in-public updates from the studio
If any of that sounds interesting, hit follow. And if you run a small business (or know someone who does), /instant is free to try.