Work · Case study

A service business that books itself.

A booking business that answers the question every host asks — is my date open, and what does it cost? — in seconds instead of hours, and runs its back office from a console built for people who would rather be pouring than typing.

Client: Golden Hour Draft Co.
Sector: Mobile tap-trailer rental for events
Where: Raleigh–Durham area, North Carolina
Status: Built 2026, ahead of the business's public launch. Shown as design and platform work; no customer data appears here.

Golden Hour Draft Co. home page: hero with the tap trailer, a date-availability check, and package cards — Home — the availability check is the first thing on the page.

Booking page with a calendar, guest count, hours and an instant quote — Book — a real price from date, guests, hours and distance, before anyone replies.

Beverage planner with sliders for guests and hours and a computed shopping list — Planner — the question that frightens hosts most, answered with arithmetic.

Operator console dashboard showing pipeline counts, approvals and today's events — Console — the operators' whole business on one screen.

Approvals queue with an AI-drafted inquiry reply awaiting the operator's approval — Approvals — drafts wait for a human until the operators promote the automation.

What we built

The build

A public site: home, packages, planner, event types, venues, journal, FAQ, contact — every word and price editable by the owners in a content studio.
Live availability, an instant quote, a date hold, a clickwrap contract with an audit record, and a deposit checkout (payments stay in test mode until the business launches).
A beverage planner: how much to buy for a crowd, computed deterministically — no model in the loop where the math has to be right.
A venue directory researched from public sources (46 venues at hand-off), each with the load-in details a coordinator asks about.
An operator console: pipeline, approvals, calendar blocks, outbox, metrics, and task-shaped guides. Every automation ships at 'draft for approval' and is promoted by the operators — a trust ladder, not a switch.
Click-to-edit on the live site (Sanity visual editing) with a gate that proves the booking math can never read a draft price.
A second business provisioned from the same code by configuration alone — the test that the platform is a product, not a one-off.

Design. Cormorant Garamond and Jost on warm cream with a golden accent — a menu, not a dashboard. Motion is scroll-revealed, reduced-motion safe, and the whole site renders without JavaScript.

Next.js 16 on AWS Lambda + CloudFront
DynamoDB
Sanity (content only)
Stripe Checkout (test mode)
Resend
Bedrock (Claude Haiku 4.5) for inquiry drafts
AWS CDK

Measured, not claimed

What we can show

142 msA

Time to first reply to a web inquiry (test traffic)

Operator minutes for a self-serve booking (test traffic)

6.8 min automatedA

Second business provisioned from the same code

≈ $5 / monthB

Infrastructure cost per business at launch volume

0 serious or criticalA

Accessibility (axe, WCAG 2.1 A/AA) across 8 pages

Numbers tagged A were measured on our own test runs and are recorded in the build's evidence bundle; B is a vendor-page cost estimate. Nothing here describes the business's customers, bookings or revenue.

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