William McIlleron

Systems that keep working
after they go live.

I'm William, a developer in Johannesburg. I build the systems behind the things you use — the code, the integrations, the automation — and keep them running after. That second half is the part most people are missing.

Available for new work

There is another version of this page. It is a planet, and you roll a marble around it. Four of the monuments on it are the work. The fifth is how you reach me.

Roll around it (opens in a new tab)

Websites, built and run

One site, built and then looked after. Three steps, and you know the price before I start.

  1. You tell me what's wrong

    What the site needs to do, who it's for, and what you're working with now. A phone call or a long email, whichever you prefer. Free, and I'll tell you honestly if you don't need me.

  2. I quote a fixed price

    One number for the whole thing, not an hourly rate that drifts. If the scope changes we agree the change before I do the work, so there is never an invoice you weren't expecting.

  3. It goes live, and I keep it running

    You see the whole site on a real link before anything is public. After that, hosting, backups and the small changes you'll want every few weeks. You never have to learn a dashboard.

What it usually costs. A single, well-built page starts at R2,000, and pages after the first are R850 each. Most sites land between R5,000 and R25,000, depending on how many pages there are and how much of the writing I do. Upkeep afterwards is R500 a month, and it's optional.

One page is often the whole answer. If someone needs to find you, believe you and phone you, more pages is just more to keep current. Domains aren't included in either number — you buy the name, I point it at the site.

Send a photo on WhatsApp (opens in a new tab)

No charge, nothing agreed until you say so. Prefer the form or email instead? I reply within two working days, usually the same day.

Bigger, more technical builds

Backends, integrations and automation. Scoped on a call, not off a price list.

Not every job is a website. Silver Lakes runs on Paystack subaccounts with a server-side split a buyer can't edit in devtools, and every table locked to its owner with row-level security. Faircopy runs real billing: webhooks, credit grants, quotas, a subscription flow that actually collects money. Vivarium's evolve loop calls Claude Code CLI against its own codebase inside guardrails enforced in code rather than asked for in a prompt. That's the kind of work this covers: the part that has to be correct, not just look right.

There's no fixed price for this the way there is for a website above — the shape of the work depends entirely on what you're already running and what it needs to talk to. Tell me what it is and I'll tell you honestly whether I can help, and what it would cost, before anything starts.

Tell me what you're building

No charge to scope it. If it's not a fit, I'll say so.

Who you'd be dealing with

I build the systems behind the things you use and then run them, which means I do the design, the code, the integrations, the deploys and the support emails. It's a useful discipline: you stop shipping things that are clever to build and annoying to own.

In practice that means pages that load in about a second on a phone with bad signal, forms that actually submit, and layouts that hold together at 320 pixels wide. I care about accessibility, because a site people can't use isn't finished. When I'm not building, I'm usually climbing or picking apart some technology I have no immediate use for.

Build
HTML · CSS · JavaScript · TypeScript
Frameworks
Astro · Next.js · Tailwind CSS · WordPress
Platform
Supabase · Cloudflare Pages · Netlify · Git
Focus
Performance · Accessibility · Local SEO · Responsive layout
William, smiling, in a white t-shirt at a cafe table in Prague, with a cold drink and a vase of flowers.

Johannesburg, South Africa.

Start a project

Tell me roughly what you need and what you're working with. I'll come back to you with questions, and an honest answer about whether I'm the right person for it.

I reply within two working days, and usually the same day.

Notes from building things

Mostly about running products rather than just building them: what I tried, what it cost, and what the numbers actually said.

All writing →