1 | Brief

Running a small web design and development business means spending a surprising amount of time inside other people’s software. Client records in one tool, project notes in another, invoices somewhere else, spreadsheets holding the parts nothing else covered, and a scattering of freelance tools on top. Nothing talked to anything else, and every subscription was a monthly cost for a fraction of the features.

MYOS was built to replace all of it with one application. It handles the day-to-day running of the business — clients, projects, invoices, quotes, tasks, expenses, subscriptions and calendar — and it also generates work: finding leads, auditing their existing websites, scoring them, and drafting outreach messages ready to be reviewed and sent by hand.

Because it holds real client information, MYOS is deliberately local-only. It runs on one Mac, binds to localhost, stores everything in a single SQLite database on disk and never syncs to a cloud service. That constraint shaped the whole architecture. This case study covers the scope and the engineering decisions behind it — the application itself is not public and there is no live link.

2 | Key Goals

• Replace several paid subscriptions with one owned tool that fits how the business actually works, not how a generic SaaS product assumes it works.
• Keep every piece of client data on one machine, with no cloud storage, no third-party account and no external database.
• Cover both sides of the business in one place — delivery and admin on one hand, lead generation and outreach on the other.
• Make automation assistive rather than autonomous, with a hard rule that no email is ever sent without a human clicking send.
• Run at effectively zero cost by default, using local AI models, with paid models available only as a deliberate opt-in.
• Build tooling that genuinely reduces manual work — website auditing, SEO tracking, WordPress fleet monitoring and content drafting — rather than another set of forms to fill in.
• Keep it fast and stable on a single desktop machine, since a runaway process here takes the whole business offline.

3 | Solution Snapshot

4 | Impact

• The business now runs from one application instead of a spread of unconnected subscription tools, with all client data held on a single machine rather than across several third-party services.
• Admin and delivery sit alongside lead generation, so an audit of a prospect’s website, the quote that follows it, the project that comes out of it and the invoices against it all live in the same system.
• The manual-send rule means the outreach and reminder features can be built out aggressively without any risk of the software emailing a client unprompted — the safeguard is in the code and in the tests, not just in the documentation.
• Routine monitoring that used to be done by memory — SSL expiry, WordPress updates, ranking drift, indexing problems, broken pages — now surfaces automatically as tasks.
• Running costs stay at zero for normal use because the AI work defaults to local models, with paid model spend a conscious choice that is metered and capped.
• As a piece of engineering it is the largest project in the portfolio: a full-stack application with its own design system, migration discipline, security ledger and performance rules, built and maintained by one person.