About
The person who answers the email is the person who builds your site.
Groundwork is a small, independent Australian studio. No account managers, no offshore hand-offs, no ticket queues — one builder, a short list of clients, and work we’re happy to put our name on.
Why Groundwork exists
We got tired of the same sad story.
A small business pays good money for a website. It gets built on the developer’s hosting, under the developer’s logins, billed through the developer’s accounts. It works — until the developer stops answering emails. Then the owner discovers the hard truth: they never actually owned their own website.
We’ve met too many business owners halfway through that story. So Groundwork was built around one operating rule that fixes it completely: we create and configure everything, but every account belongs to you. Your name, your email, your card, your keys.
It’s more work for us. It also means you could walk away from us the day after launch and your site wouldn’t notice — which is exactly the kind of promise we’d want if we were the ones buying.
How we operate
Four principles, no fine print.
You own everything
Every account — domain, hosting, code, database — is created in your name from day one. At handover you hold every password and we don't. It's the whole reason Groundwork exists.
Plain English, always
You'll never be handed jargon or a settings page. You describe what your business needs; we translate it into technology and explain anything you want explained.
Fixed prices, in writing
$300, $600, $1,000. The number you agree to is the number you pay, and anything outside the agreed scope gets its own written quote before work starts.
Built properly, kept small
We build on the same professional stack this site runs on, keep builds deliberately simple, and never take on more clients than we can personally look after.
The proof
This site is the portfolio.
Everything you’re looking at — this website, the live client sites, and every concept demo — was designed and built by Groundwork on the exact stack we hand over to clients. If you like how this feels to use, that’s the product.
Based in Australia, working with small businesses and solo founders everywhere.