Independent web shop — one site at a time
Launchpad Web Engine builds the missing piece for businesses that are already working — the ones with the good reviews, the regulars, the line out the door on Saturday, and nothing to type into a browser. One page, built by hand, written by a person.
Start an email Look at four examples
$797 flat / half to start / usually up to two weeks /
unlimited changes while we build / the files are yours, always
/ $50 a month if you want us to put it online and keep it there
Why we exist
Every town has forty businesses that are unmistakably working. The reviews are good. People tag them in photos. And if you search the name you get a Facebook page last touched in 2019, a phone number, and a map pin.
That gap is not a marketing problem, it is a permanence problem. A website is the thing that makes a business look like it will still be there next year. It is also the only address on the internet that nobody can take away from you, change the rules on, or bury in an algorithm.
So we wrote a tool that reads one area at a time and finds exactly those businesses. Then we reach out on social media, one at a time, and offer to fix the one thing that is missing. That is the whole company.
Our scraper sweeps an area looking for businesses with a real following, real reviews, and no website attached to any of it. If a message from us turned up in your DMs, that is why — nobody sold us your details and nobody gave you up.
We send you one short form. What you do, what it costs, when you are open, and the questions customers always ask you on the phone. We write the rest. It takes about ten minutes and there is no discovery call.
You see it before anybody else does and we change whatever you want — there is no limit on changes while we are building, and we do not count them. Then the whole thing is handed over and it is yours outright, files and all.
The $797 buys the website. The $50 a month is what gets it onto the internet and keeps it there: the launch, the hosting, the domain, the certificate, the backups, and two bulk edits a month whenever your prices or hours change. You can host it yourself instead — the files are yours either way — but this is the part nobody enjoys doing, so most people hand it to us.
Worth saying plainly: these are four made-up businesses we built out properly so you can judge the work without us pretending somebody hired us. Click any of them — it opens full size, and you can scroll around inside it like a real site.
Yours would not look like any of these. That is rather the point of building four of them.
The design, the build, the writing, the phone-sized version, the contact form, and the finished files handed over to you. Changes while we are building are not rationed — we keep going until you are happy, however many passes that takes. What it does not include is putting the thing on the internet.
This is the part that puts your website on the internet and keeps it there. We launch it, host it, run the domain, keep the security certificate valid, and back it up — none of which you ever have to understand or log into.
Then two bulk edits a month: one email with everything in it — new prices, new hours, six new photos, a whole new section — counts as one. Most shops use one and forget the other, and it means your site is never a year out of date, which is the exact reason most small business websites stop being believed.
About $1.65 a day. No contract, cancel any month you like.
Then don't. You get the files, you put them wherever you like, and you handle the launching and the upkeep yourself — genuinely fine if you have a nephew who does this sort of thing. You can start the plan later, or stop it, without asking permission.
No contract, no setup fee, no "starting at," no third tier with a gold border that nobody has ever bought.
A finished website, and the files for it. Designed for your business rather than pulled off a shelf, written by a person who read your reviews, built to load fast on a phone. Not a demo, not a trial, not a starting point — the examples above are the size and depth of thing we are talking about. The one thing $797 does not include is getting it onto the internet and keeping it there. That is the $50 a month.
No. Buy the build, take the files, and put them online yourself or hand them to whoever does your computer things. But that is the bit people get stuck on — you need a domain, somewhere to host it, a security certificate, and something to renew every year, and if any of it lapses the site quietly disappears. For $50 we do all of that, keep it backed up, and change whatever you want twice a month. Cancel any time and we hand over the files and help whoever takes it on.
Because the work happens before you see anything, and we have been burned. $398.50 starts it, the other half is due when we hand the finished site over, and if you walk away in the middle you keep everything built so far. We would rather explain this once than pad the price to cover the people who vanish.
One email, however much is in it. Change all your prices, swap the hours, add eight photos, rewrite the about section and add a new service — that is one edit, because it arrived in one message. Two of those a month are included in the $50 plan. Sending eleven separate one-line emails is the only thing that will make us sigh. Note this is a plan thing only — while we are building your site there is no limit on changes at all.
It depends on the site and on how many rounds of changes you want, but it is usually up to two weeks from the day your form comes back. Most of that is waiting on you rather than us. The fastest one so far was five days; the slowest was eleven weeks because the owner was mid-renovation and stopped answering, which is completely allowed.
You own it. The domain goes in your name, the files are yours, and if you cancel the monthly plan we send you a zip of the whole site and help whoever you hand it to. We do not hold sites hostage. It is a bad way to run a business and an even worse way to sleep.
It is enough to be found. It is not enough to be believed. A page cannot show a full price list without burying it in a post from March, it ranks badly for "your trade + your town," it changes its own layout without asking, and roughly half your customers over fifty will not click into it at all. Keep the page. Just have somewhere to send people from it.
Your services and prices, your hours, your address and phone, a sentence or two about how the business started, and any photos you already have on your phone. If you have no photos we design around it — two of the four examples above have none at all and neither looks empty.
Tell us and we change it. There is no cap on changes while we are building — we keep going until it is right, because a site you are embarrassed by does neither of us any good. If it is still wrong after a fair few passes, we part ways and you keep the deposit's worth of work.
Booking and menus, usually yes — often by wiring in the tool you already use rather than building a new one. A full online shop is a different job and a different price, so say so in your first message and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it.
Get in touch
Write to us and we will send back a short form — the questions we actually need answered to build the thing, and nothing else. No discovery call, no chat bubble following you down the page. Fill it in whenever you get five minutes.
Ten minutes. Skip anything you are not sure about — we will ask.