Honest pricing
Quoted up-front, no surprises. If something changes scope, we tell you what it costs before we do it.
About
Built because Windham County deserves better.
My family has been in the Brattleboro area for generations, and I lived nearby (Williamsville) full-time before life circumstances took me away. After building many live production websites, I brought everything I learned back to the place that was always home: Brattleboro and the towns of Windham County.
My Story
How Brattleboro Local got here.
Start with the part that matters most: several generations of my family are from the Brattleboro area, and I lived in Brattleboro full-time before my work took me away. I am now transitioning back to full-time Vermont living, and Brattleboro Local is the company I am building as I come home. This is not a satellite office or a bet on a market I found in a spreadsheet. These are my towns.
I'm not a career software developer, and I'm not going to pretend to be one. I'm a business owner. Over the years I built and ran several of my own businesses, and I built the website for every one of them myself - not because I was a coder, but because the agencies quoting me wanted big-city prices for work I could see was thin.
Early on that meant Dreamweaver. For a long stretch after, it meant the usual platforms - Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, WordPress. They got the job done, but I always hit the same ceiling: a template only bends so far.
Then I found Claude Code - Anthropic's AI development tool - and everything changed. I used it to build genuinely custom, fast, modern sites from scratch - no template limits, no compromises. Two things hit me fast: I was far more excited about building the sites than about the businesses they were for, and nothing being sold to small businesses came close to what I could now build. So I kept building - for local service businesses, one site at a time, until I had built and was operating more than a dozen live production websites, every one custom-coded, every one running right now.
Brattleboro Local is the homecoming. Every time I walked Main Street or drove Route 30 up the West River Valley, I saw the same gap I had been closing everywhere else: excellent independent businesses - the kind my own family has known here for generations - with websites that do not do them justice. Windham County deserved the same caliber of platform, so I brought it home, with its own name, its own focus, and one standard. You can see the whole track record on the Portfolio page; every site on it is live.
Here's the part I won't hide: I build with Claude Code. The AI writes code under my direction; I bring the judgment - what to build, how it should work, the business sense, the real-device QA, and the part where an actual human picks up the phone. That combination is the edge. It's how a small studio hands a Windham County business a fully custom, AI-search-ready site - with a custom chatbot built in - in weeks, not months, and at a fraction of agency prices.
I'd rather tell you exactly how it's made than dress it up. If that's the kind of straight talk you want from the person building your website, we'll get along.
The Mission
Close the gap between what's sold and what's actually built.
Small businesses in Windham County are underserved online. The realistic options have been a national template builder that makes your site look like every other site on the internet, a big-city agency at big-city prices, or a WordPress build that is slow the day it launches and fragile every day after. Walk down Main Street in Brattleboro or through the village center in Putney and you will find excellent businesses living with websites that undersell them badly.
That's the gap Brattleboro Local closes.
Every project we take on gets treated the same way: as if it were for our own business. Same architectural standards. Same obsessive attention to Core Web Vitals, schema markup, AI-search readiness, mobile responsiveness, and accessibility. Same uncomfortable honesty about what's actually worth doing versus what's billable busywork.
Exceeding Your Expectations.
Internal mantra. Applied to every engagement, every deliverable, every line of code.
Not "meeting" expectations. Not "satisfying" them. Exceeding them. Every time. That's the standard the company is built on, and the standard every project lives up to.
Philosophy
Why custom-built. Why hands-on. Why Windham County.
Why custom-built
WordPress runs roughly 40% of the web. It's also the source of nearly every plugin vulnerability, every "site is suddenly slow" complaint, and every "the developer disappeared and now no one can update it" story. Templates compound the problem. They ship with code for features you'll never use and miss the features your business actually needs.
Custom-coded sites ship the exact code your business needs and not one byte more. They load in under a second on a good connection. They score 100 on Lighthouse out of the box. They don't break when a plugin you didn't know existed pushes a bad update at 2am.
Why hands-on
Most agencies sell layers. A salesperson sells you, an account manager onboards you, a project manager runs your build, a designer designs it, a developer codes it, and somewhere in the middle the original promise gets diluted. Every handoff loses information, and the strategy you bought into in the first meeting rarely survives contact with the production team.
Brattleboro Local works differently. The senior person you talk to first stays involved through the entire engagement - kickoff, design, build, launch, and ongoing support. There are no junior handoffs, no offshore subcontracting, and no game of telephone between the people who promised the work and the people who deliver it. The strategy that gets sold is the strategy that ships.
Why Windham County
Local SEO is local. An agency running campaigns for a Brattleboro plumber or a Wilmington inn from an office three time zones away does not know that half the customers drive in from Hinsdale and Keene across the river, that "near Mount Snow" beats a zip code in ski season, or that Route 30 up the West River Valley is its own small economy of inns, farm stands, and trades.
We know these towns because they are ours. We know that Newfane is the county seat but Brattleboro is where the traffic is, that Route 9 over the mountain to Bennington and I-91 down to Massachusetts are how customers actually reach you, and that business here runs on distinct seasons - foliage, ski, summer - plus the neighbors who carry you through mud season. That context is not in any keyword tool. It shapes which pages we build, which towns get their own page, and which searches we go after first.
Meet the Founder
Mike Ferreira
Founder
Mike Ferreira is the founder of Brattleboro Local. Several generations of his family are from the Brattleboro area; he lived in the area (Williamsville) full-time before life circumstances took him away, and founding this company is part of his transition back to full-time Vermont living. A longtime small-business owner, he built the websites for his own businesses for years - first with Dreamweaver, later on platforms like Squarespace, Wix, and WordPress - before discovering Claude Code, Anthropic's AI development tool. With it he built and operates many live production websites for local service businesses - every one custom-coded, every one running right now. Brattleboro Local brings that same platform home to Brattleboro and Windham County. He builds with Claude Code - directing the AI while bringing the business judgment, design decisions, and real-device testing himself - and is candid about exactly how the work gets made.
Track Record
What we've built before this.
Before Brattleboro Local, the founder built and operates more than a dozen live production websites for local service businesses, each with an owner-editable CMS, local-SEO town pages, an AI chatbot, and a self-writing blog.
Every one of those sites is live right now, and the Portfolio links straight to them - click through and judge the work yourself. The same architecture now powers the sites Brattleboro Local builds for Windham County businesses: custom code, AI-search-ready structure, and the kind of engineering local small-business sites almost never get.
See the Portfolio
How We Work
Three principles, applied to every project.
Tight feedback loops
Weekly progress updates with specific deliverables. You always know what we're working on and when it ships.
Long-term partnership
A website isn't a one-and-done project. Every build includes ongoing hosting and maintenance, and we invest in understanding your business so the site can grow with it year after year.
Currently
Small. Intentionally. Growing carefully.
Brattleboro Local is currently small - intentionally. Mike is the founder, the person who directs every build, the strategist who scopes projects, and the person who picks up the phone when you call. Every site we ship is built under his direction, with Claude Code - and every detail goes through him.
That model will change as we grow, but how it changes will be deliberate. Whoever joins next will be a senior craftsperson, not an account manager. The "the person who pitches is the person who builds" principle isn't something we'll sacrifice to scale faster. If we can't grow while keeping that promise, we'll grow more slowly until we can.
Last reviewed: by Mike Ferreira.
Common Questions
Common questions before you hire us.
One founder, building with Claude Code. The person who answers your first email is the same person who directs your design, ships your site, and supports it after launch. No account managers, no offshore subcontractors, no junior handoffs.
Yes - and we are upfront about it. Brattleboro Local launched in 2026. The company is new; the founder and the work are not. He has built and still operates more than a dozen live production websites plus three large custom platforms - all with Claude Code, Anthropic's AI development tool - and his family has been in the Brattleboro area for generations. See the Portfolio page: every one of those sites is live, so you can verify the work yourself right now. What being new here means for you: lower prices than established shops charge for comparable work, more direct attention because the client roster is small, and AI-search-ready architecture from day one. What it does NOT mean: a wall of testimonials. We will not fabricate one.
Because WordPress for a small business marketing site is the wrong tool. The 30-50 plugins required to make a modern WordPress site do anything useful become 30-50 attack surfaces, 30-50 update prompts, and 30-50 reasons your Lighthouse score is 38 instead of 98. Custom-coded sites ship a tenth of the code, are far harder to attack, score perfect on Core Web Vitals out of the box, and do not break when an unrelated plugin updates at 2 AM Saturday.
Small businesses in Brattleboro, Bellows Falls, Putney, Wilmington, Newfane, Townshend, Londonderry, Dover, and the surrounding Windham County towns - typically 1-50 employees, often owner-operated. Service businesses (trades, professional practices, restaurants, inns and hospitality), local retail, healthcare practices, real estate, and similar. We are intentionally not chasing enterprise work or Fortune 500 brand projects.
The phone number on this site rings the founder, not a call center. We answer same-business-day during business hours, within an hour for site-down or security issues, and we monitor every client site around the clock. Windham County is a small market where reputation travels fast, and we intend to build ours the slow way: by doing the work well.