Guides & playbooks
Plain-English guides to owning your stack.
No filler and no fake statistics — just the reasoning, the real numbers, and the real trade-offs behind how we build. These are the playbooks we actually run for clients on ownership, AI-era SEO, headless commerce, and automation.
Latest guides
Read the thinking behind the work.
Ownership & economics
You own your stack: self-hosted vs platform fees, the real 5-year math
Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace recurring-fee math laid against owning an open-source, self-hosted build — with a worked 5-year total-cost model and fair cases for when each one actually wins.
AI-era SEO
AI-era SEO: how to get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews
The crawl → cite → click funnel, entity graphs, llms.txt, info-gain, and Speakable/FAQPage schema — the exact method for becoming a source that AI assistants quote, not just a page they skip.
E-commerce
Headless e-commerce with Next.js + Medusa: when it beats Shopify
A fair split: when Shopify is genuinely the right call versus when a self-hosted headless store on Next.js + Medusa wins on cost, control, and the fees you stop paying.
Automation
Workflow automation with n8n: cutting SaaS sprawl for a small business
How self-hosted n8n replaces a stack of paid automation SaaS — with concrete example workflows, a cost comparison, and the real limits of doing it yourself.
Pricing & budgeting
How much does a website really cost in 2026? Agency vs DIY vs platforms
Real number ranges for DIY builders, freelancers, agencies, and owned open-source builds — plus the 3-year total-cost math that platform pricing pages never show you.
SEO & migrations
Website migration without losing SEO: the actual checklist
Redirect maps, canonicals, Search Console, and the launch-week watch — the concrete, ordered checklist that keeps your rankings when you move platforms, domains, or hosts.
Performance
Core Web Vitals for business owners: what LCP, CLS, and INP mean in revenue terms
The three speed metrics Google grades your site on, translated into money: what each one measures, how to check yours in five minutes for free, and which fixes actually move them.
Email & infrastructure
Email deliverability for small business: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC explained
Why your quotes and invoices land in spam, what the three DNS authentication records actually do (in plain language), and the exact setup order — now mandatory since Gmail and Yahoo tightened the rules.
Why we publish these
The AI web rewards sources that say something specific and fair, not pages that restate the obvious. Every guide here has to clear our own info-gain gate — at least one real number, framework, or trade-off you can’t get from the generic top result. It’s the same standard we build client content to. If it helps you make a better call, whether or not you hire us, it did its job.