We are not in the Loop. We are a ten-person web and software team in northern Italy, working in English for US companies, seven hours ahead of Chicago. Here is what we build for Chicago businesses, what it costs, and the cases where a local agency is the better choice.
Six kinds of project cover almost everything that reaches us from the US. The first job on any call is working out which one you actually need — fairly often it is smaller than the one you came in asking for.
A handful of pages done properly: who you are, what you do, who for, how to reach you. Fast on a phone, accessible, and written around the words your customers actually type into Google. From €350 one-off, or €24.80 a month with hosting and changes included.
Product pages, checkout, shipping rules, sales tax settings, order handling. Shopify when it fits, custom when it does not, and connected to your inventory or accounting so nothing gets keyed in twice.
iOS and Android apps, or an installable web app when the App Store adds nothing. Booking, loyalty, field service, ordering, internal tools for crews who are never at a desk.
Inventory, jobs, scheduling, quoting, service reports. Built around how your company works instead of how a SaaS vendor decided everyone should work. Custom systems start from €1,500.
Leads, deals, orders and documents in one place, plus a portal where clients check status themselves instead of emailing you. Usually saves more hours than the public website.
Two systems that do not talk, and a person retyping data between them: QuickBooks, Shopify, HubSpot, Salesforce, spreadsheets. Automating that handover has the fastest payback of anything on this list.
Every city has its own mix of businesses, and its own software problems. These are the ones we see most from Chicago.
Chicago moves a huge share of the country's freight. Shipment tracking portals for customers, dispatch and driver apps, dock scheduling, and the integrations between TMS, WMS and accounting that are currently somebody's full-time job.
Product configurators and quoting tools, dealer and distributor portals, production tracking on the shop floor, maintenance scheduling for machines across several plants.
B2B ordering for restaurants and grocers, lot traceability, recipe and cost management, and sites that help buyers find you before the trade show, not at it.
Sites for accounting, legal and consulting firms that rank on specific services, plus client portals for document exchange that replace the email attachment chain.
Booking and intake flows, patient-facing apps, internal scheduling — built with HIPAA-conscious hosting and data handling where health data is involved.
For contractors across the suburbs: estimating tools, job scheduling, crew time tracking, and websites that bring calls from Naperville, Schaumburg or Evanston rather than from nowhere.
Chicago is a practical market, and Chicago businesses tend to ask the practical question first: what does it cost and what does it save? That suits us. Our quotes are fixed, written and usually a fraction of a Loop agency's, because we carry far less overhead — not because we cut the hours.
A lot of what reaches us from the Midwest is not a website at all. It is a company that runs on spreadsheets, a legacy system nobody wants to touch, and three people retyping orders between them. Replacing that with a system built around your actual process is often the project with the fastest payback.
Illinois has one law every app builder here should know: BIPA, the Biometric Information Privacy Act. If an app or time clock uses fingerprints or face scans, written consent and a retention policy are required, and the lawsuits have been expensive. We design time-tracking and access apps to avoid biometrics unless you truly need them — and when you do, consent and retention are built into the flow.
Italy is seven hours ahead of Chicago. Between 8 and 11am Central we are both working, and that window is where calls and decisions go. Most of our build time happens before your day starts, so a question you send in the evening usually has an answer, and often a working fix, by the time you open your laptop.
The paperwork is simple: contracts in English, a fixed price in writing, invoices without Italian VAT, and intellectual property assigned to your company. Domain, hosting, Google accounts and source code are registered in your name from launch.
When we are the wrong choice. If you need someone in your office every week, a supplier on chat through your whole afternoon, or a team of fifteen running in parallel on a seven-figure program, a Chicago firm is the right answer — and we will tell you that on the first call rather than three months in.
"Web design Chicago" is held by agencies and directories with years of links behind them. Chasing it in month one burns budget without moving a position.
Chicagoland search splits by neighborhood and suburb — West Loop, Lincoln Park, Naperville, Oak Brook, Schaumburg, Evanston — and for B2B by the problem: "freight broker software", "food distributor ordering portal". Those narrow searches are where a well-written page ranks in months instead of years.
For companies selling to other businesses across the Midwest, the most valuable pages are often the boring ones: a specific service, a specific industry, a specific integration. Fewer visits, far better leads.
Yes, in English. Italy is seven hours ahead of Chicago, so calls go in your morning, between about 8 and 11am Central. Most of the build happens before your day starts, which means questions sent in the evening usually have answers by morning.
Yes. The simplest approach is to avoid biometrics entirely — PIN, badge, GPS check-in or photo confirmation without facial recognition. If you need fingerprint or face scans, the app collects written consent, follows a published retention schedule and deletes data on time. Your counsel should review the policy wording.
Usually, yes. If a system has an API, or even just a reliable export, we can integrate it. We check feasibility on the first call before quoting, so you do not pay for an integration that turns out to be impossible.
A company website costs €350 one-off, plus €150 if you want the initial optimization for Google and Bing, or €24.80 a month with hosting, domain, maintenance and content changes included on a 24-month minimum term. Web apps start at €50 a month or €750 one-off; custom business software starts at €1,500. Larger projects get a fixed quote after a free analysis.
Italy is 7 hours ahead of Central time. We schedule calls in your morning, which is our afternoon, and do most of the build while you are offline. In practice you get answers overnight rather than waiting for them during your day.
Yes. On the one-off option the domain, hosting, content and source code are registered in your company's name from go-live, and the code lives in your repository. There is no license tied to us and no lock-in.
Thirty minutes on a video call, free and with no sales deck: we tell you what you actually need, what it costs and how long it takes to go live. If we are not the right fit, we tell you that too.
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