Stop winging it.
Get the groundwork done.

A business system — inventory, sales, cashflow, a customer list, whatever your business actually needs — built by your AI and you, perfectly shaped around exactly how you work. Not another spreadsheet, and not bloated enterprise software built for a company ten times your size. It's yours.

Local runs on your own computer — your data never leaves your machine, it's a one-off cost, and it's yours forever. Hosted runs in the cloud for you, so you can reach it from any device including your phone, share it with your team, and we keep it backed up and running for a monthly fee. Same as a local system — the difference is where it lives, who keeps it running, and the more advanced features hosting enables. You can start Local and move to Hosted at any time.

No, and no. You never touch code. The whole point is that your AI does the building, and you describe what you need in plain English. If you can explain how your business runs, you can maintain this to your requirements and grow it as your needs change.

Whatever your business needs — stock and inventory, sales and orders, a market or job calendar, cashflow and profit, recipes and costings, a customer list, reminders, simple reports. Together we build the modules that fit your business, not a one-size-fits-all template. Five things done brilliantly beats fifteen done badly.

You do, on both. Your system, your data, and your domain are yours, always. No lock-in: you can export everything any time and walk away. Local lives on your machine; Hosted we run for you, but it's still entirely yours.

A relaxed, no-jargon conversation where we map your business — what you sell, what you track, what's not working, and what you wish you had. Bring your data or spreadsheets if you've got them. You'll come away with a small preview of your system, and there's no cost and no obligation.

You decide how much to share, and you can share very little. If you'd rather not send real records, just give us your column headers (or headers plus one example row) — that's enough to design your system's structure, and we never see your actual data; you load it in yourself later. If you're happy to share a full spreadsheet, we can also capture the clever logic you've built into it for a richer first version. Either way, anything you share is used only to design and build your system — never sold, never shared, and never used to train AI — and handled under our Privacy Policy. The discovery itself runs through your own Claude, so you can delete the conversation whenever you like, and your Anthropic account settings control whether your chats are ever used to improve their models.

Absolutely — bring anything that shows what you're after: a page you like, a report, even a competitor's brochure. We use it as inspiration to understand what you want, then build you something original that's yours. What we won't do is copy someone else's branding or content — that's theirs. If an example belongs to another business, just make sure you're happy to share it with us, and we'll take the ideas, not the artwork.

After you're onboarded, most often a first working version in a single afternoon — with your real data already in it, not an empty shell. From there it keeps improving as your business grows.

Claude is the AI that builds and runs your system, and on every plan you bring your own Claude subscription — about the price of one small software tool. "Fully managed" on Hosted means we look after the app and the services around it; the Claude that powers it is always yours, not something we pay for. On Local that's your only ongoing cost — no fee to GroundWork at all; on Hosted you simply add the monthly hosting.

Yes — that's the Hosted plan. Reach it from any device, with a secure personal login for each person on your team. Local is single-machine by design (and can be upgraded to Hosted whenever you're ready).

Often, yes. Things like a booking tool, a basic CRM, a stock spreadsheet or quoting can be built right in, so you own them instead of renting them. New modules are rolling out too — GroundBuzz, a customer loyalty & rewards program (instead of a monthly loyalty app); GroundSwell, email & outbound marketing (instead of Mailchimp); and Automations, jobs that run themselves on a schedule or when something happens (instead of Zapier) — you build and change them yourself, and for an older tool with no easy connection, a "runner" can even do the clicking for you. Some things we don't try to replace — your accounting (Xero, MYOB), payroll and banking are best left where they are. Instead we bring their key numbers onto your dashboard, so everything's in one place.

There's a Help button built into your system — one tap sends a bug, a question, or a feature idea straight to us. Small changes you can often make yourself just by asking Claude; bigger ones we handle for you.

No lock-in, ever. Local is a one-off $495 (after that, just your own Claude subscription). Hosted is from $79/month with the build included (3-month minimum). Your data is always exportable on either plan. Pricing is a starting guide — discovery maps exactly what fits and what doesn't. The price only goes up if you add a feature that would cost money to keep the lights on, and we will advise you in advance.

Yes. We never sell your data and we don't build profiles on you. Local data stays on your own machine; Hosted runs on secure cloud infrastructure with regular backups. The full detail is in our Privacy Policy — or see exactly how the architecture protects it on our Security page.