{"slug": "hi-i-m-building-fivedaylaunch-a-website-studio-for-local-service-businesses", "title": "Hi, I'm building fivedaylaunch — a website studio for local service businesses", "summary": "A developer built fivedaylaunch, a website studio for local service businesses that delivers hand-designed sites in five business days for $25/month with no upfront fee. The tech stack uses Node.js, SQLite in production, and Claude Haiku for AI-assisted content generation, running on a single DigitalOcean droplet.", "body_md": "I've been building [fivedaylaunch](https://fivedaylaunch.com) 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.\n\n##\nThe idea\n\nLocal service businesses — plumbers, salons, cafes, dentists, photographers — usually end up in one of two bad spots:\n\n- Try Wix/Squarespace and give up after two weekends because they don't have time to learn a builder, or\n- Pay a local agency $2,500–$8,000 upfront for a site that still looks generic\n\nNeither 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.\n\nIf you want to see it, [try /instant](https://fivedaylaunch.com/instant) — put a business name in and you get a real preview site in 60 seconds. No signup, no card.\n\n##\nThe tech stack (probably more interesting to this crowd)\n\n-\n**Server:** Node.js + Express (customer portal) + a small Python service for AI-assisted content generation\n-\n**DB:** SQLite with WAL mode. Yes, in production. It's plenty for our current scale and eliminates a ton of ops overhead.\n-\n**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.\n-\n**AI:** Claude Haiku for the daily content pipeline, with a template + heuristic fallback when determinism matters more than creativity\n-\n**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.\n\nDeliberately unfancy. When your daily customer volume is measured in the tens, boring tech is the correct choice.\n\n##\nWhat I'll be writing about here\n\n- Small-business tech stack decisions\n- SQLite in production (I'll die on this hill)\n- AEO / GEO — getting your product cited by ChatGPT / Claude / Perplexity, which is a different beast from classic SEO\n- Build-in-public updates from the studio\n\nIf any of that sounds interesting, hit follow. And if you run a small business (or know someone who does), /instant is free to try.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/hi-i-m-building-fivedaylaunch-a-website-studio-for-local-service-businesses", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/fiveday_launch_e064494c4b/hi-im-building-fivedaylaunch-a-website-studio-for-local-service-businesses-2imh", "published_at": "2026-07-11 20:29:21+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-11 21:16:22.679604+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "developer-tools", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["fivedaylaunch", "Claude Haiku", "DigitalOcean", "Node.js", "Express", "SQLite", "Python"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/hi-i-m-building-fivedaylaunch-a-website-studio-for-local-service-businesses", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/hi-i-m-building-fivedaylaunch-a-website-studio-for-local-service-businesses.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/hi-i-m-building-fivedaylaunch-a-website-studio-for-local-service-businesses.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/hi-i-m-building-fivedaylaunch-a-website-studio-for-local-service-businesses.jsonld"}}