AI & App Development for Small Business
Custom apps and AI-powered tools that help you run your business, not just show it off.
Most small businesses have a handful of jobs that eat up time for no good reason: re-entering the same details somewhere else, chasing information that's already written down somewhere, doing by hand what a well-built tool could do in seconds. That's the gap this service fills. Not another website, a piece of software built around the way you actually work.
Custom business apps
A booking system, a job tracker, an internal dashboard, whatever fits how your business actually runs, not a generic template stretched to cover it. Built as a real web app your team logs into from a phone, tablet, or desktop.
AI-powered automation
The admin work that eats an hour a day, entering the same information twice, chasing paperwork, turning a supplier invoice into a spreadsheet row, can usually be automated. I build tools that take a photo, a form, or a message and turn it into structured, usable data automatically.
AI assistants that actually know your business
Not a generic chatbot bolted onto a website. An assistant that knows your services, your process, your hours and your stock down to the spec of an individual item, because it reads from your own material through a searchable index that keeps itself current as things change. It answers in your business's voice, says so when it doesn't know, and hands off to a callback or a booking rather than leaving someone stuck. Built on established providers like Google's Gemini models.
AI content and image pipelines
Need on-brand visuals, product shots, or written content produced at volume rather than one at a time? I build pipelines that generate publish-ready output in seconds, the same approach behind tools I've built and run myself.
Real-time, multi-user systems
Staff logged in from different devices seeing the same live information, no refreshing, no waiting for someone else to finish. Useful the moment more than one person needs to see the same job, booking, or list at once.
Installable, app-like tools
A tool that installs like an app on a phone or sits in kiosk mode on a tablet at the counter, without the cost or delay of building and submitting a separate native app to the app stores.
I build these myself, not just for clients
I don't just talk about AI and custom apps, I run my own. One of them is Oona, a subscription family app with a real-time shared calendar and a built-in AI assistant: take a photo of a handwritten list and it turns the items into calendar entries and a shopping list automatically, no manual typing. It's live today, not a demo, with real subscribers using it daily.
That's the standard I hold custom work to: built properly, actually used, and maintained, the same as every website I ship.
Oona, live at oona.co.nz
How it works
Understand the workflow
I start with what actually happens day to day, not a feature wishlist. Usually the biggest win is a task nobody thought to mention because they've just always done it that way.
Scope and prototype
A clear plan for what's being built, what it costs, and roughly how long it takes, plus an early working version so you're reacting to something real, not a document.
Build and integrate
Built to connect with what you already use where it makes sense, rather than asking you to abandon tools that work fine.
Support and iterate
Software is never really finished. I stay on to fix, adjust, and extend it as your business changes, the same ongoing relationship I offer on websites.
Common questions
Yes. Alongside websites, I build custom web apps and AI-powered tools: booking systems, internal dashboards, and assistants that automate the admin work specific to how your business runs. I build and run these for my own tools too, so it's tested capability, not a new offering I'm guessing at.
Within reach
Custom software used to be out of reach for a business your size. Not any more.
This is one of the real upsides of AI: the kind of custom apps and automation that used to need a big team and a big budget are now genuinely within reach of small and medium businesses. Every build is a fixed price, scoped and agreed up front, so there's no open-ended meter running. The best first step is a free, no-obligation chat about what would actually help, and whether it's worth building at all.
Tell me what you want your website to do.
The first consultation is free and no-obligation, and a fixed-price quote follows if it's a fit. You'll get straight answers either way, from a local you can actually ring.