Three apps every consultant should have on their own site

I run designsetgo.dev and I also do a small amount of consulting on the side. Two different audiences, one WordPress install.

For the consulting side, three small interactive surfaces do almost all the lead-qualification work I would otherwise pay a stack of SaaS for. All three are DesignSetGo Apps. All three took an afternoon to build. All three are better, for my purposes, than the equivalent SaaS subscription.

This is the inventory. If you do any kind of consulting work and you have a WordPress site, build these three in priority order.

App 1: A booking form (not Calendly)

Calendly is great. It is also $12/mo per user, it sends visitors to a calendly.com URL, and it hands the email collected at booking to a third party.

The DesignSetGo replacement: a small app that reads my calendar availability (via a Connector to Google Calendar or via a manual “next 10 days available slots” list I maintain), renders a slot picker, captures the booker’s email and project description, and emails me the booking. It lives at /book/ (and as a block I can drop into any “Work With Me” page).

The prompt to Claude Code was roughly:

Build a booking app. Show the next 10 weekday availability slots from a hardcoded list in a constants file (I’ll edit it weekly). Slot picker, then a form for the booker’s name, email, and one-sentence project description. On submit, call dsgo.email.send with the booking details to my address. Show a thank-you screen with the slot they picked.

Bundle. Manifest with permissions.send: ["email"]. Deploy. Twenty minutes.

What I gain over Calendly: the booker stays on my domain, my brand, my consent text. The email captured is mine; it goes to my CRM (in my case a private WordPress CPT for leads). There is no monthly subscription. There is no extra account for the booker to know I exist on.

What I give up: real calendar sync. The hardcoded list works because I update it weekly. If I were doing 5 bookings a week instead of a few a month, I would either write a Connector for Google Calendar or use Calendly. For the volume I have, manual is fine.

App 2: A quote calculator

A common consulting first-call: “what would this cost?” The honest answer is “it depends,” but the half-honest pre-call answer is a range based on three or four inputs. A quote calculator on the marketing site lets the visitor self-qualify before booking.

For me, the inputs are: project type (audit, implementation, ongoing), team size (1-2, 3-10, 10+), and timeline (weeks, months, quarters). The output is a range and a recommendation.

The prompt:

Build a quote calculator. Three inputs: project type (audit, implementation, ongoing), team size (1-2, 3-10, 10+), timeline (weeks, months, quarters). Show a price range based on a lookup table (I’ll edit the JS constants). Below the range, a recommendation paragraph based on the inputs (“for a small team doing an audit, I usually recommend…”). Bottom CTA: “Book a call to discuss” linking to /book.

Bundle. Manifest with no special permissions (the math is local; no bridge needed). Deploy. Fifteen minutes.

What I gain: the visitor self-qualifies. The unrealistic leads (a 50-person team wanting an audit for $500) bounce on the calculator instead of on the call. The realistic leads click through to the booker pre-warmed.

What I give up: the lead-gen value of “submit your info to see the price” forms some sites use. I do not want that anyway; it filters out the people I want to talk to (the ones doing research before buying) and lets through the people I do not want to talk to (the ones who will give a fake email to bypass).

App 3: A “what I cost” pricing page

The third surface, the one I resisted longest, is a real pricing page. Not a “contact for pricing” page. A page with numbers.

For consulting this is controversial. The standard advice is “do not publish your prices because every project is custom.” That advice is right for very large engagements with custom scopes. It is wrong for the small-to-medium engagements that make up most of consulting work.

For me, the right shape was: three packaged offerings (one-day workshop, two-week implementation, ongoing retainer), each with a published price, each with a “Book this” CTA that goes to the booker pre-selected on the corresponding slot type. Custom engagements still happen, but they start from the published anchor.

The page itself is a DesignSetGo App in inline mode (so the page has a real URL with SEO and the served HTML includes the pricing in plain text, not just JavaScript-rendered). The card layout, the “popular” highlight, the in-page FAQ are all in the app’s bundle. There is no PHP, no shortcode wrangling, no theme template override.

The prompt:

Build a pricing page app, inline mode for SEO. Three pricing cards horizontal on desktop, stacked on mobile. Each card: title, price, three-line description, four-bullet feature list, CTA button. Middle card is highlighted as recommended. Below the cards, a four-question FAQ. Style it to look like a clean consulting site, generous whitespace, sans-serif.

The DesignSetGo Apps repo already has a pricing-page example bundle; I started from that and customized.

What I gain: the page is part of the marketing site, ranks on Google for “[my name] pricing” and “[my company] consulting cost,” and pre-qualifies the visitor before the booker. The card layout is exactly what I want; no Webflow editor, no Squarespace template fight.

What I give up: the conversion optimization of the dedicated SaaS pricing tools (Outseta, Paddle’s pricing widget). For my volume, the conversion improvement those would offer is not worth the SaaS subscription and the third-party domain.

What this costs in total

Three apps. About 60 minutes of building time across all three (and another 60 minutes of iteration after I saw them live). One DesignSetGo Apps Pro license for dsgo.email.send() (~$99/yr).

The SaaS stack the three apps replace:

• Calendly Basic: $144/yr
• A typeform-style quote tool (Outgrow, Typeform, or similar): ~$300/yr
• A pricing-page service (Outseta, Paddle’s pricing component, or similar): ~$300+/yr

Total: ~$750/yr in SaaS subscriptions, three external services to maintain, three pieces of my conversion funnel running on someone else’s domain.

Versus: ~$99/yr for DesignSetGo Apps Pro, zero external services, everything on my domain.

The cost-savings argument is not the most interesting one. The conversion argument is. Every external SaaS subscription is a third-party domain showing up in tooltips, an extra brand the visitor encounters, a redirect they have to trust. The three apps on my own domain feel like one continuous experience the visitor stays inside. The conversion lift is small per-app but compounds.

What I am not doing

A few things I considered and decided against, for honesty:

A live chat widget. Intercom-style chat. I do not want to manage a live chat queue and I do not want a chatbot trying to schedule meetings on my behalf. The booker plus the calculator covers most of what live chat is asking.

A testimonial carousel. I have client logos and a few quotes on the home page. A live “fetch fresh testimonials from a database” widget is more infrastructure than the testimonials justify. Static HTML is fine.

A blog subscription widget. I have an RSS feed and a “Subscribe via email” link that goes to a separate ESP. A custom widget here would be its own app and worth building, but it would be the fourth on the priority list, not the first three.

The shorter version

Booker, quote calculator, pricing page. Three apps, one afternoon each, on your own site, in your own brand. Replaces three SaaS subscriptions, gives you back the conversion control.

If you build these for your own consulting site, send me a link. I want to see what shape they take in other people’s hands.

Further reading

• Build a quote calculator your client can drop into a sales page: the agency-facing version, walked end-to-end.
• The pricing page is a DSGo App: the inline-mode pricing-page tutorial.
• examples/pricing-page and examples/contact: the starter bundles I built from.