Northlight · Sydney

Describe it badly.

You don’t have to know what’s broken. Working that out is the first thing we do — and it’s the part we don’t charge for.

1200
Read it back to me

Free, and there’s no form around it. No email address, no call to book. If the honest answer is a setting in something you already pay for, it says that instead.

355sites already built and live, one per business
Freeyou see it working before anything is due
Onestudio, one invoice, one number to ring
Sydneyyou deal with whoever built it
01 — The roof

It’s one studio, not four products.

Inhouse, Sidecar, Callout and the websites aren’t four companies with four invoices and four people to chase. They’re four depths of the same job, and they all sit inside Northlight. You don’t pick between them — you describe the problem and we tell you which depth it is. Often it’s the shallowest one.

01 Websites The site itself — designed, built, hosted and looked after, so you never think about it again. Three hundred and fifty-five are already built and live, one per business. From $99 a month 02 Callout Answers your phone in your business’s name, on a real Australian number. It takes the job, gets the address and texts you what it heard — while you’re still under the sink. Answering calls today 03 Sidecar AI working beside the software you already run, rather than instead of it. Nothing gets ripped out, nobody learns a new system, and the thing you hate doing quietly stops needing you. Quoted after the read 04 Inhouse Custom software for the job that has outgrown a spreadsheet somebody still maintains by hand. Quoting, scheduling, chasing payment — one screen instead of five tabs and a person holding it together. From $4,500

Bigger than any of those — a multi-site rollout, research behind a login, a whole brand from scratch — is work we take too. It just can’t be honestly priced from a web page, so describe it in the box and you’ll get a fixed number before anything starts.

02 — The read

Nobody describes it well the first time.

And they don’t need to. Written badly is fine — badly is how it actually sounds in someone’s head. Here is the shape of what comes back.

Typed into the box

“honestly we’re just drowning. every job needs chasing, nothing’s where it should be, and if Kim’s off it all stops.”

Read back

Work arrives in three different places — email, the phone, and whoever happens to be at the desk — and it only becomes real once somebody types it into one list. Everything that gets chased is something that never made it into that list.

Which is why it stops when Kim is off. Kim isn’t doing the chasing because she’s thorough. She’s doing it because she’s the only place the three versions meet.

An example of the shape, not a client — we don’t publish anyone’s words but our own. The box at the top of this page does this with yours, in about a minute, without asking who you are.

03 — At volume

355 sites, built before anybody was asked to pay.

Our website engine builds a real, finished site for a business out of what’s already public about them, then puts it live at its own address. Three hundred and fifty-five of them are sitting on our servers right now, one per business — each a working site rather than a template preview, and each paid for only if the owner decides they want it kept.

northlightstudioco.com/preview/…
One of the 355 sites built and hosted by the website engine

One of the 355. Built automatically and hosted live — finished and waiting at its own address before the business has had a single conversation with us.

Search for your business

04 — On the phone

The one that picks up.

A missed call is a job that rings the next name on Google. Callout answers instead — live, on a real Australian number, in your business’s name. It knows what you do, what you don’t, and how far you’ll travel, and it hands you the job rather than a voicemail.

It answers as you

Not “the answering service”. Your trading name, your hours, your suburbs, and the jobs you actually take. The caller books; you get a text with what was said and where it is.

It’s ours to run

Set up, written, connected and looked after by the same studio that builds everything else here. There is no second vendor and no second invoice — it is one of the four rows above.

See Callout

05 — Working with us

You see it working before you pay.

The honest fear about handing a build to a small studio is paying and getting nothing back. So nothing about the order of this is decorative.

  1. 01

    The read, before you speak to anyone. One box, your own words, no email address. You’ll know what we think is happening before you’ve decided whether to ring us.

  2. 02

    Then fifteen minutes, and we mostly ask questions. If the honest answer is a setting in software you already pay for, that’s what you’ll hear, and there’ll be no invoice. We’d rather be the people who said so than the people who charged for it.

  3. 03

    A fixed price before anything starts. Not an hourly rate that drifts. Scope sets the number, we work it out with you, and it doesn’t move. If it’s a big enough decision we’ll spend a week trying to break the plan first — the hard look, $750, and it comes off the build in full.

  4. 04

    Half to start, half once it’s working. The second half isn’t due until the thing is built, running, and you’ve opened it yourself — so you’re holding half the money the whole way through. On the websites, the preview is built before anything is due at all.

  5. 05

    Then we look after it. Things break. When they do it’s ours, and you get the person who built it rather than a ticket queue.

06 — Honestly

Who this isn’t for.

If you want the cheapest possible version of something, we’re the wrong studio. We quote one fixed number and it’s rarely the lowest one you’ll get.

If you want a team of ten and a twelve-month roadmap, also wrong. We’re small on purpose and we build one useful thing at a time.

And a fair share of what people describe to us isn’t a build at all — it’s a setting in something they already pay for, switched off. We say so, there is no invoice, and we’ve just spent an hour making ourselves nothing.

We do it anyway, and not out of good manners. Anyone can claim they’d be honest with you. Doing it before you’ve paid for anything is the only version of that claim worth listening to.

Start

Say it badly. That’s the whole ask.

Write the bit of the week everyone avoids the way you’d say it out loud — “we retype orders from email into Xero twice a day and half the time something’s wrong” — and you’ll get back how we think the work actually runs, what’s breaking, the one question we’d ask, and the thing we’d build.

1200
Read it back to me

And if the honest answer is that it’s a setting in software you already pay for, it says that instead.