One operator. Two products.
Both shipped by the same person.

Origin

I started designedbyanthony.com in 2020 building websites for restaurants and contractors around Rome, NY. The work was straightforward — hand-coded sites that loaded fast and brought in calls. But every project hit the same wall: after launch, leads landed in a Google Form or a Squarespace inbox and got lost. I'd ship a beautiful site and watch clients lose 30% of their inbound to a bad follow-up workflow.

I tried HubSpot. I tried Pipedrive. I tried gluing GoHighLevel onto Zapier. None of it worked for a five-person plumbing shop — the cheapest tier was either too dumb or too expensive, and the dashboards were built for SaaS sales teams, not local trades. So I built VertaFlow. First for my own clients, then for anyone who'd pay for it.

The studio

designedbyanthony.com is the studio brand — custom websites for service businesses, restaurants, and local trades across Central NY and the Mohawk Valley. Hand-coded in Astro (static-first) or Next.js (dynamic when needed), deployed to Cloudflare Workers. Five-day turnaround on standard 5-page builds. Refundable until the client signs off on the live preview.

I don't use page builders, themes, or WordPress. Not because they're evil — because they cost the client speed, control, and a fair shot at durable visibility. A hand-coded site loads in under a second, gives search and AI systems cleaner proof, and survives the next round of plugin-hell churn. If your business depends on the site bringing in calls, you want code.

The CRM

vertaflow.io is the CRM I built so my own studio clients would stop bleeding leads through cracks in Zapier. It started as a single lead-capture widget glued to a Postgres table. Today it's a full pipeline tool with widgets (forms, popups, review collectors), citation runs (the Power Lister), Google speed score monitoring, and a white-label client portal for agencies.

Free tier with no card. Paid tiers start at $19/mo for the form widget; $79/mo gets you Power Lister; $199/mo is the agency Multi-Site cockpit. I use VertaFlow on every ANTHONY studio project — which means it gets battle-tested before it ships to anyone else.

Why both

Most studios ship a site and disappear. Most CRMs are sold by people who've never built a website. The umbrella exists because the two jobs are the same job — your business runs on a website that brings in leads and a system that follows up on them. Treating them as separate vendors is how leads get lost.

VertaFlow is 30 days free with no card — 60 days if you add a card or you're a web-design client. When you sign up and ask "who should redesign my site?" — I'm the same person on the other side of that conversation. The discount stacks because the work is connected.

How the wheel works

The cross-brand spin wheel on the homepage is a promo loop tying the two brands together. New visitors get one spin (per IP, per month) and land on a real offer — $200 off a custom build, 3 months free on VertaFlow, a free competitor benchmark checkup. The codes are real, redeemable on either site, and tracked across both — so a spin on .online that lands on a VertaFlow prize unlocks the discount when you create an account at vertaflow.io.

It's a launch offer, and it's an honest one. The prize table is published and the odds are the same for every visitor. No "you have to enter your email first."

What I don't do

• Enterprise sales. If you have a CIO and a quarterly procurement review, I'm the wrong vendor. I work with owners, not committees.
• Offshore subcontracting. Every line of code I ship was written by me. No farm labor, no handoff to a team you never meet.
• E-commerce stores. Shopify exists and is good at this. I focus on informational sites for service businesses where the conversion is a phone call or form fill.
• Long-term retainer lock-ins. Local Visibility retainer is month-to-month. You can leave any month. VertaFlow is monthly billing with no minimum term.
• Marketing fluff. No "synergy." No "leveraging." No vendor speak in briefs. Read the blog if you want to know what the writing voice sounds like in real life.