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.
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.
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.
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