We hired an agency to build our company's website. We paid six figures. We waited six months. We gave feedback through three rounds of stakeholder calls, a Figma file nobody updated, and a design system document that ran thirty-two pages.
When it finally launched, we didn't like it. The hero was generic. The typography was bland. The navigation had been designed for a committee. And the thing took four seconds to load.
We had paid more for this site than most of our customers pay for a car, and we were embarrassed by it.
We decided to rebuild it ourselves over a weekend. The weekend turned into a week. The budget turned out to be under $5,000 · most of which was font licensing and hosting.
No mood boards. No stakeholder calls. No Figma. We wrote the copy first. Then we built the site in-browser, iterating on the live URL. When something felt wrong, we changed it that afternoon. When something felt right, we moved on.
Seven days later, we had a site we were genuinely proud of. Faster. Clearer. More us.
A few weeks after launch, we rebuilt our mother's small business website (allseasonsnh.com) in a single day. Her reaction was the whole reason NearBlack now exists.
We realized the exact problem we'd lived · overpriced, overscoped, overslow · was being lived by every business owner we knew. Most of them had already paid for a site. Most of them quietly hated it. None of them could afford to do it again the traditional way.
NearBlack is the studio we wished had existed when we needed it.