I got tired of renting my tools.

It started with my friend Ben Chisholm. He founded Beacon Accounting — a bookkeeping business — and needed a website that looked more professional, automations that actually worked, and tools that talked to each other instead of living in separate tabs. Classic small business pain.

So over a weekend, I put together a stack for him. Open-source CRM, headless CMS, static site on Cloudflare. It worked. Really well.

The tools I picked were practical choices, not ideological ones. Twenty CRM because there are no seat fees — add 5 users or 50 and the cost doesn't change. Strapi CMS because anyone can edit content without calling a developer. Astro + Cloudflare because the hosting is free and the sites load in under 100ms. Mercury because the invoicing API is clean and modern.

The scheduler was the one thing I built from scratch. Every booking tool I tried either charged money for basic features or looked like it hadn't been updated since 2008. A calendar isn't that complicated, so I made my own.

Then I connected Claude to the whole stack through the Model Context Protocol. Suddenly I could say "Show me my pipeline and draft a follow-up for that lead" and it would actually do it — pulling real data from the CRM, not hallucinating.

That's what Birbol is. I build the stack, I keep it running, and I build custom apps on top of it when you need them. birbol.com runs on the same stack I build for you.

I'm not the only person who does this kind of work. If you need bigger org management, heavy Microsoft admin, or just want a second opinion on pricing or services, I'd point you to my friend Cody at Greenville IT Consulting — he's highly trusted and very competent. If you're curious about why Birbol costs what it costs, book a quick call — it's free. I'm not trying to bill you for a conversation.