Sparring partner for technical decisions.

Technical decisions are easier to make than to undo. The wrong host, the wrong platform, the wrong tool stack, the wrong rebuild-vs-maintain call – small at the time, expensive in retrospect. By the time you’re three months into building it, the question of whether to build it at all has stopped being on the table.

I do consulting work for people who want a real second opinion before they commit – someone who’ll push back, ask the questions you haven’t, and tell you when you’re about to make an expensive mistake. The product is honest advice, not implementation. If implementation makes sense after, that’s a separate conversation.

Moving hosts, moving platforms, consolidating sites, or undoing a previous migration that didn’t go well. You’ve done your research and you want someone who’s seen this go wrong before to pressure-test your plan.

You can hack something together with three plugins, or pay for a proper SaaS tool, or commission a custom build. Each option has a different total cost – including the ones you won’t see for a year. You want to think it through with someone who’s lived with each kind of decision.

You’re running five overlapping tools because each one was added to solve a specific problem at the time, and now nothing talks to anything else cleanly. You want to think about consolidation without breaking what currently works.

Caching strategy. Database choices. Multi-region setup. Custom development that’ll be hard to walk back if it doesn’t pan out. Decisions that look small in the planning phase and become load-bearing six months later.

The current site has been patched and maintained for years. Every change is starting to take longer than it should. You’re not sure whether you’re at the point where rebuilding is genuinely cheaper than continuing to maintain, or whether that’s just frustration talking.

Email isn’t being delivered. The site is mysteriously slow on Tuesdays. A specific page won’t index. Something works on your laptop and breaks on Sarah’s phone. You don’t need a project, you need someone to look at it for an hour and tell you what’s going on.

Which host is right for which kind of site. When a VPS is overkill and when shared hosting is a trap. Control panels – Runcloud, Enhance, GridPane, cPanel, raw nginx. Server-level performance tuning. Migration planning. When the answer is “stay where you are.”

What Cloudflare can and can’t do for your specific situation. When to use the free tier and when to pay. Workers, R2, Pages, Tunnel, Zero Trust – what’s marketing and what’s actually useful for the kind of site you run. Setup and configuration if it makes sense, or recommend against if it doesn’t.

Which CRM, email platform, forms provider, automation tool, membership system, or analytics setup fits your operation. Less about which exists and more about which sits well with what you’re already running. I’ll either recommend, or recommend someone better placed to evaluate specific verticals.

Before the migration, not during. URL mapping, content audit, SEO continuity, DNS strategy, hosting decisions, plugin/integration mapping, redirect logic, a realistic timeline. Done right, a migration is a non-event. Done wrong, it can take six months to recover.

When custom development is worth it and when you’d be better served by buying something that already exists. Total-cost-of-ownership thinking that includes the part nobody likes to estimate – the ongoing maintenance burden. Sometimes the answer is “build it.” Sometimes it’s “buy something off-the-shelf and live with the limitations.” Often it’s a hybrid.

When the current site is past the point where maintenance is good value. Honest analysis of what rebuilding would cost (including the parts that always get under-estimated), what you’d gain, what you’d lose, and whether the timing is right. Sometimes the answer is “rebuild.” Often it’s “not yet, here’s what to fix first.”

The implementation layer of GDPR, accessibility (WCAG/EAA), cookie consent, data residency, and adjacent requirements. Not legal advice – I can’t tell you what the law requires – but I can tell you how to implement what your lawyer or compliance lead has decided you need. For deeper compliance work, I can recommend specialists.

Connecting tools that don’t have a native integration. Make/Zapier vs custom webhooks vs hosted middleware. When automation is the right answer and when it’s just adding fragility. Where the obvious automation has a hidden cost (the brittle one that breaks silently and you only find out three months later).

Whether to add AI to a workflow, a product, or an internal process – and how. Model selection, retrieval architectures, where AI is worth the money and where it’s just hype with a good demo. There’s a dedicated page for the deeper AI strategy work, but if your question fits inside a broader technical consulting conversation, we can handle it here.

Looking at custom development by another team and giving an honest assessment – what’s solid, what’s worrying, what’s a maintenance problem waiting to happen. Most useful before you sign off on a delivery. I’ll do this where I know the stack well and refer you to someone better placed where I don’t.

Email not working on Sarah’s phone counts. So does “the site looks weird in one specific browser,” “we’re getting a hosting bill that’s three times what it was last year,” and “we’re considering doing this thing – is it a terrible idea?” Sometimes consulting is just a thinking partner for an hour.

Write me an email describing what you’re trying to figure out. A few paragraphs is fine. I’ll reply and tell you whether I think I can help, what shape the engagement would take, and what it would cost. If it’s not a fit, I’ll say so and point you at someone better placed where I can.

Hourly rate for one-off questions, second opinions, code reviews, deliverability investigations, and specific problems. Time is tracked honestly – if something takes 40 minutes, that’s what gets billed.

For larger pieces – migration planning, build-vs-buy analysis, rebuild-vs-maintain analysis, architecture reviews – a day rate is usually cleaner. You get focused attention on the question, a written summary at the end, and a clear scope so the engagement doesn’t drift.

Most of it is email back and forth, sometimes with a call when the question is easier to talk through than type out. I don’t do “workshops” – workshops are calls with extra branding. Where a written deliverable makes sense (migration plan, decision memo, architecture review), I write one. Where the answer is “do this,” you get an email saying do this.

When I recommend a specific host, some links may be affiliate links – they help cover the time I spend testing and evaluating providers. I’ll always say when a link is affiliated. The recommendation comes from fit, not commission. If I think you should host with someone who doesn’t pay affiliates, I’ll tell you that and you can find your way there.

Consulting from €50-80/hour, one hour minimum. Day rate from €400 for larger pieces. First conversation always free. Existing retainer clients get the first hour of any new question on the house, because that’s usually where the bigger questions surface.

The product is the thinking, not the doing. If implementation makes sense after, we’ll talk about it separately – sometimes I’ll take it on, sometimes I’ll recommend someone else. The consulting engagement stands on its own and doesn’t require either of us to do follow-on work.

“Should I expand into this market?” “How do I price this?” “What should I post on social media?” These are real questions, just not mine. There are people who do this work properly, and I’m not one of them.

“What kind of developer should I hire?” “Is this candidate any good?” “What should I pay them?” I’d rather refer you to people who recruit in this space full-time than fake competence I don’t have.

I can implement what compliance requires, but I can’t tell you what compliance requires. For that, talk to a lawyer or a compliance specialist – and I’m happy to recommend people I trust.

A few paragraphs describing what you’re trying to figure out. The more specific, the better – “we’re considering moving from {X}host to a managed WordPress host before Black Friday” is much easier to respond to than “we want advice on hosting.” I’ll reply within a day or two, usually with either a clear “yes, here’s what that would look like” or a clear “this isn’t for me, talk to so-and-so instead.”