What I do, how you buy it, and what I won't take on
Nearly all of my work is the same job wearing different clothes: an ecommerce system is already running, money is already moving through it, and something has to change without breaking. Below is how that work is usually shaped, the areas I go deepest in, and an honest list of things to hire somebody else for.
How engagements are shaped
Four shapes cover almost everything I have done in sixteen years. Most relationships start as the first and turn into the second.
Fixed-scope project
A defined piece of work with a beginning and an end. An integration, a migration, a rebuild of one subsystem. Scoped after a paid discovery if the problem is not yet clear.
Typical length 3 weeks to 6 months
Billing fixed price or milestones
Ongoing retainer
A reserved block of my time each month for maintenance, upgrades and the steady stream of small things. This is what most of my long relationships actually were, including nine years at Arkansas Lighting.
Typical length rolling, 3 month minimum
Billing monthly, hours roll over once
Emergency triage
Something is down or losing money now. I look first, tell you what is wrong and what it will take, then we decide whether I am the one to fix it.
Response same day, business hours CET
Billing hourly, first look is free
Fractional CTO
Technical direction for a company without a senior engineer in-house. Stack and workflow decisions, hiring, estimates and vendor management. I did this for six years at Jola CGI while still writing code.
Typical length 6 months and up
Billing monthly, days per month agreed
Paid discovery or audit
A short, fixed piece of work that ends in a document rather than code. Reading an existing codebase before anyone quotes on it, auditing a store's performance, or checking whether your site is even reachable by the crawlers you think are indexing it.
Typical length 3 to 10 days
Billing fixed, and you keep the document either way
White-label for agencies
You own the client, I do the work behind you. I take your process and your project manager, pick up an unfamiliar codebase quickly, and never appear in front of your client. Roughly half my last decade worked this way.
Typical length per project or ongoing
Billing your rate card or mine, agreed up front
Where I go deep
Ordered by how much of it I have actually done. The count next to each is real projects, not years, because years are easy to accumulate and projects are not.
Full-stack development
This is the default, not the leftovers. Most of what I have built began as an empty directory — custom theme, templates, database schema, admin, the lot — and the specialisms below happened inside those builds rather than as visits to somebody else's codebase. Twenty-six projects from scratch, and I still take the inherited ones nobody wants to touch.
BACKEND
- PHP 8
- WordPress
- WooCommerce
- Laravel
- MySQL
- REST APIs
FRONTEND
- JavaScript
- React
- jQuery
- SASS
- Three.js
- Gutenberg
INFRASTRUCTURE
- Linux
- NGINX
- Apache
- Git
- WP Engine
- Multisite
Subscriptions and recurring billing
Renewals, dunning, plan changes, proration, failed payment recovery, and the migration off whatever system you are on now.
ProgressiveChristianity · Informed Citizen · Sparketh · iclsociety · dnacademy · aimacademy · ObG
What this involves SIX PROJECTSLMS, membership and credentialing
Course delivery, gated content, assessments, credit and wallet systems, and certificates that carry professional weight.
ObG Project · Sparketh · dnacademy · aimacademy · iSixSigma · Bit Space
What this involves FOUR PROJECTSMigrations that keep billing running
Moving subscribers, orders, payment tokens and content off a legacy system while renewals continue. Old database repaired before anything moves.
ProgressiveChristianity · iclsociety · Informed Citizen · Sparketh
What this involves FIVE PROJECTSStripe and PayPal integration
Gateways, tokenisation, webhooks, refunds, split flows and the reconciliation nobody thinks about until the numbers disagree.
ProgressiveChristianity · Sienna Lee Gardens · donacije.rs · Comtrade
What this involves THREE PROJECTSB2B and wholesale commerce
Dealer portals, per-customer contract pricing, tiered accounts, gated catalogues, and B2B and B2C running side by side on one platform.
Moes Home Collection · Rennie & Rose · Alfresco Home
What this involves THREE BUILDSProduct configurators
Letting a customer build the product before they buy it, priced correctly, against live catalogue data rather than a static options table.
Arkansas Lighting (WebGL) · pozivnice.rs · a reusable WooCommerce plugin
What this involves ONE CLIENT, NINE YEARSERP and CRM integration
Two-way sync of products, stock, orders and customers between a storefront and the system of record — including replacing or extending a connector you have outgrown. Deep rather than broad, and I will say so on the call.
NetSuite · Macolla · Salesforce · Dynamics · HubSpot
What this involves ACROSS THE PORTFOLIOPerformance and technical SEO
Core Web Vitals measured on real user data, slow queries, plugin and theme reduction, Elementor optimization, caching layers, and the crawlable structure underneath it.
Foreign Policy · Comtrade · hotsport.rs — all high traffic
What this involves NEWER WORK · SAID PLAINLYAI features and agentic development
Assistants, extraction and search grounded in your own data, plus agents that take actions behind an approval gate. Built into what you already have.
This site first · see /llms.txt and the agent card
What this involvesWhat it usually costs
Ranges, not quotes. Every real figure comes after a call, and I would rather you self-select out here than after three emails. Most projects land in the medium column.
A new site, built from nothing
Medium quality is ACF blocks, your design or one adapted, standard integrations, tested and documented — the version most people need. High quality is custom blocks, bespoke features, deeper integrations, performance and accessibility worked properly.
| Type of site | Medium quality | High quality |
|---|---|---|
| Presentational5–10 pages, forms, contact, basic SEO | $2,000 – 2,900€1,800 – 2,70030–45 hours | $3,250 – 4,900€3,000 – 4,50050–75 hours |
| EcommerceCatalogue, checkout, payments, shipping, tax | $7,000 – 11,000€6,500 – 10,000110–170 hours | $14,000 – 22,000€13,000 – 20,000220–340 hours |
| Subscription or membershipPlans, gated access, recurring billing, accounts | $10,000 – 15,500€9,500 – 14,500160–240 hours | $19,500 – 30,000€18,000 – 28,000300–470 hours |
| Custom applicationBespoke logic, ERP or CRM sync, configurator, portal | $17,000 – 27,000€15,500 – 25,000260–420 hours | $30,000 – 52,000+€28,000 – 48,000+470–800+ hours |
What moves the number: how clean the existing data is, how many external systems are involved, who owns the pricing rules, and whether a design already exists.
Not included: content, photography, design if you are not supplying it, hosting, and third-party licences.
Maintenance and retainer
Same-day response, one business day at the outside. On every plan. Unused hours roll over one month.
Essential
$500€450PER MONTH- 7 reserved hours
- Updates and monitoring
- Emergency work at standard rate
Standard
$750€690PER MONTH- 12 reserved hours
- Updates and monitoring
- Emergency work at −15%
- Quarterly review
Priority
$1,200€1,100PER MONTH- 20 reserved hours
- Updates and monitoring
- Emergency work included to the hour limit
- Quarterly review
Custom
—AGREED- For anything that does not fit
- Reserved days rather than hours
- Agreed scope and response
By the hour
| StandardDepending on the work being done | $50 – 75€45 – 70PER HOUR |
| Out of hoursWeekend and night work, security cleanup and urgent bugs | $90 – 120€85 – 110PER HOUR |
The first look at an urgent problem is free. Every service page opens with a small fixed-price diagnostic you keep whether or not you hire me for the fix.
What I don't do
This list exists because saying no early is cheaper for both of us than discovering it in month two.
Visual design from nothing
I can build a design well and I have opinions, but I am not a designer. Bring one, or bring a direction, and I will execute it properly.
Brand, logo, copywriting
Different discipline entirely. I will happily recommend people.
Shopify and BigCommerce
Hosted platforms with their own ecosystems. My depth is WordPress and WooCommerce, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
Content SEO and link building
I do the technical layer — speed, structure, markup, crawlability. Keyword strategy and content production are somebody else's job.
Native mobile apps
Web, including installable web apps, yes. Swift and Kotlin, no.
Rescuing a business model
If the store is not selling because nobody wants the product, a faster checkout will not fix it. I will tell you that on the first call rather than take the money.
Not sure which of these you need?
That is normal, and it is what the call is for. Bring the platform, the order volume, and the thing that is currently going wrong.