The slow drip that breaks the dam
It starts with a plugin. You need a contact form, so you install one. Then you need SEO, so there's another. Then a booking plugin. Then an events calendar. Then a page builder because the theme doesn't do what you need. Then a caching plugin because all the other plugins have made your site slow. Then a security plugin because the other plugins have made your site vulnerable.
Each one costs a little more. Each one adds a little more bloat. Each update risks breaking something else. And you're told to keep your plugins low for performance - by the same ecosystem that made you install thirty of them.
I lived it myself for years. The themes, the builders, the slow creep of fees for features that give you nothing but bloat. The cookie consent plugins that don't actually make you compliant. The "premium" upgrades that should have been included from the start.
So I stopped using them. I started building from scratch.
I built the audit tool to check my own work. Then I checked everyone else's.
After a year of building specialist apps - a nutrition platform, an astrology engine, a coaching site, a content management system - I wanted a way to validate my own sites against the standards that actually matter. Performance, security, SEO, accessibility, legal compliance. So I built a 17-phase audit methodology.
That was a week ago.
To validate the tool, I started auditing practitioner sites. Therapists, healers, coaches, trainers. The same people I'd been building apps for all year. And the results were devastating. Missing meta tags. Broken structured data. Non-compliant cookie consent. Accessibility failures. Plugin bloat destroying performance. Analytics that miss a third of visitors. The exact same pattern, on every single site.
That's when it clicked. I'd spent a year building every piece of the solution - website, community, courses, events, email, analytics, AI - each as a separate app. They just weren't connected yet.
Ankorium is all of those apps, in one place. And every audit finding that flags a problem on their current site? Our platform handles it by default.
Every app I built became a module. Every audit became a benchmark.
Each of these started as its own project. Each one taught me something the next one needed. Together, they became Ankorium.
Plaskett College
Nutritional therapy college platform. Student management, course delivery, assessments, certification. Built in 2006. Still running in production twenty years later.
2006 - present · 20 years in productionNutriLuma
AI-powered nutrition tracking. Practitioners monitor clients' meals from photographs, tracking 44+ nutrients in real time. Machine learning meets clinical nutrition.
AI · Computer vision · 44+ nutrientsThe Alchemy of You
Wellness coaching platform. Six-pillar approach with a free-to-paid pathway. Community, courses, and content - the prototype that proved the multi-feature model works.
Community · Courses · Free-to-paid pathwayCT600 Filing
Taught himself the HMRC filing gateway to build a direct corporation tax filing system. Replaced an accountant. Because the problem was worth solving and the existing tools weren't.
HMRC gateway · Self-taught · Problem solvedSite Audit Service
Built a week ago to validate my own sites. Started auditing others to stress-test the methodology. 23+ practitioner sites later, the findings were identical every time: plugin bloat, missing meta tags, broken compliance, no real analytics. The tool I built to check my work became the proof that everyone else's was broken. And the sales engine for the platform that fixes it.
1 week old · 23+ clients · The catalystNine years Royal Marines. Twenty years building software. Zero patience for tools that don't work.
I served with 42 Commando, 1989–1998. Sniper, long-range reconnaissance, parachutist. The kind of work where you learn to study the terrain, build with what you have, and never make the same mistake twice.
I came to software with no CS degree. Taught myself everything from first principles. Twenty years later, the approach hasn't changed: understand the problem, build what works, stay long after the invoice is paid. I've kept one platform running for twenty years. I don't build things and disappear.
Ankorium is everything I've learned, in one place. One server. One codebase. Unlimited tenants. Each one white-labelled, AI-powered, and fully connected. Everything talks to everything because it's all in one database.
Built by one person. With Claude. From Looe, Cornwall.
One server. One codebase. Unlimited tenants. Each one white-labelled, AI-powered, and fully connected. Everything talks to everything because it's all in one database. Built by one person. With Claude.
Enough is enough.
If you're tired of the plugin tax, the hidden fees, the tools that don't talk to each other, and the slow drip of charges for features that should have been included - this was built because I was tired of it too.
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