Hi, I'm building fivedaylaunch — a website studio for local service businesses

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.

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. 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 https://fivedaylaunch.com/instant — put a business name in and you get a real preview site in 60 seconds. No signup, no card. 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. 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.