About
Small on purpose. Probably permanently.
Wovelo is a UK technology company built around one idea: small businesses should be able to buy good technology without needing to become experts in it first, and without being charged for the privilege of not understanding what they bought.
Why this exists
The same conversation, four times in a year.
Written by the person you'll be emailing. There is no marketing department to blame it on.
I've spent most of my working life building software inside organisations big enough to have a procurement process. It's a good place to learn what makes systems reliable, and a terrible place to learn what small businesses actually need — the budgets are different, the tolerance for a six-month project is different, and there's always someone else whose job it is to explain things to the people using them.
What kept happening was this. Somebody I knew — a builder, a physio, someone running a two-van business — would mention their website, or the software they'd been sold, or the quote they'd just had. And every time it was the same shape of story: a lot of money, a long wait, a thing that technically worked, and nobody left to ask when it didn't.
One of them had paid four figures for a site that had never once produced an enquiry. Another was manually retyping order details between two systems, every day, because connecting them had been quoted at more than the business made in a month. Neither of them had been ripped off exactly. They'd just been sold to by people who had no real interest in whether the thing worked afterwards.
What changed my mind about starting this
For years the honest answer was that doing this work properly, at a price a small business could pay, didn't add up. The hours involved were the hours involved.
That stopped being true. The tooling got good enough that a large part of a build — the repetitive, careful, time-consuming part — can now be done in a fraction of the time it used to take. AI does the heavy lifting so I can spend the time on getting things right for the business it's for: understanding what they actually need, writing copy that sounds like them, testing the awkward cases, being there when it goes live.
That's the whole business model. Not cheaper because it's worse — cheaper because the boring part costs less than it did in 2019, and I'd rather pass that on than pocket it and keep charging 2019 prices.
What that means for you
You'll deal with the person doing the work. Your questions get answered by someone who can actually answer them, usually the same day. When something goes wrong — and occasionally it will — you'll get a straight explanation rather than a status page.
It also means we're honest about capacity. If we can't start for three weeks we'll say three weeks, not “we'll get you in the pipeline”. And if a job is genuinely too big for a business this size, we'll tell you that instead of taking it and struggling.
Andy CarterFounder/Director, Wovelo Ltd
How we work
Four rules, and we'd rather lose work than break them.
Every company has values on a page somewhere. These are the four that have actually cost us money, which is the only test that means anything.
01
Woven in, not bolted on
If a thing we build needs you to change how you work in order to be useful, we have built the wrong thing. It should slot into the way the business already runs — or it should not exist.
02
Fast, because slow costs you money
AI does the heavy lifting on the parts of a build that used to eat weeks, so we can spend that time on the bits that actually need judgement. That is why three weeks is realistic rather than a sales promise.
03
Say the number first
Price, scope and date, in writing, before anyone commits. If the scope changes we tell you what it does to the number before we do the work, not on the invoice afterwards.
04
Say no when no is the answer
We have talked people out of rebuilds, out of automations, and once out of hiring us entirely. It costs us work in the short term and it is the only reason anyone recommends us.
Managing expectations
Things Wovelo is not.
- Not an agency. There's no creative director, no strategy tier and no minimum engagement. If your job is a day, we'll do a day.
- Not a reseller. We take no commission from any software vendor, which is why the consultancy advice can afford to be blunt.
- Not going to grow to thirty people. The moment there's an account manager between you and the work, the thing that makes this worth buying is gone.
- Not the cheapest. There's always someone on a freelance marketplace who will do it for a fifth. Occasionally that works out. We're priced to still be here in two years when you need something changing.
Where we work
Anywhere in the UK, in person where it helps.
Most of what we do works perfectly well over a call and a shared screen. For consultancy days we'd rather be in the room — watching how work actually moves through a business tells you things no workshop ever will. Travel is included within about two hours of us; beyond that we'll agree it upfront.
- [email protected]
- Serving
- United Kingdom
- Reply time
- Same working day, usually within the hour
Still reading? You may as well ask us something.
No form-filling required for a first conversation. Email, or book twenty minutes and describe the problem out loud — it's usually faster than typing it.