From website builder to all-in-one SaaS platform

A plumber shouldn’t need a web designer to get a website, or five separate subscriptions to run a business. GoSite gives local service businesses one platform to do both — and Toobler has spent more than six years building it, growing a simple website builder into an all-in-one SaaS platform that now supports over 10,000 businesses.

Customer and context

GoSite is a San Diego SaaS company with an all-in-one digital platform for local service businesses — plumbers, landscapers, cleaners and other home-service operators. From one place, and designed for owners with no technical background, a business can get found online, get booked, get paid, collect reviews and message customers — across web and native mobile.

Toobler is the product-engineering partner behind the platform, in one of the company’s largest and longest-running engagements: it began in 2016 as a website builder for the startup and has evolved, over roughly six years, into a full business-management ecosystem.

The challenge

Most local businesses run their online presence on a stack of disconnected tools: one app to build a website, another to schedule appointments, a separate payment gateway, a messaging tool, a reviews service, an invoicing platform. Each solves one problem, but together they mean switching between systems all day, re-keying customer data, duplicate records and a pile of subscriptions — higher cost, lower productivity, an inconsistent customer experience.

GoSite’s vision was the opposite: one platform where a business establishes its presence and runs every customer interaction from a single interface. Delivering that meant solving several engineering problems at once:

• A no-code experience on an enterprise-scale architecture. Owners with no technical skill had to be able to build a site and run the business — while the platform behind it scaled to thousands of customers, cloud-native and reliable. Balancing that simplicity against that scale was the defining tension of the project.
• Interconnected services, not bolted-together apps. Messaging, appointments, payments, reviews, invoicing and contacts had to share one customer record and stay in sync — the thing separate tools never do.
• Consistency across web and native mobile.
• Continuous expansion without disrupting live users.
• The website builder itself had to change. The original was a drag-and-drop grid of custom components that required a skilled designer to assemble each site — powerful, but it didn’t scale as the customer base grew, and customers had no way to roll back a change.

The solution

A no-code website builder that anyone can use. Toobler re-imagined the builder by separating the editing experience from the published output in a hybrid architecture. Fully customizable, mobile-responsive themes replaced designer-only grids — a non-technical owner can now build and publish a professional website in 1–2 hours, and the site connects to the platform’s services so visitors can book, pay, review and message without leaving it. Version control lets owners save and restore previous versions — experiment freely, roll back a bad edit. The builder is now scaled to support 10,000+ businesses, with sites created self-service rather than by designers.

A unified business platform. The core capabilities — contact management (the CRM the rest reads from), appointment booking, online payments, digital invoicing and subscriptions, review management and customer messaging — were built as interconnected services sharing one contact record and one dashboard, not separate apps. A business runs its whole customer journey from a single place.

The full experience on mobile. Native iOS and Android apps deliver the same platform on a phone — respond to messages, confirm appointments, take payments, monitor reviews from anywhere.

A cloud-native, serverless foundation. The platform runs on:

• a React front end, with legacy AngularJS modules kept compatible;
• a Node.js and Express backend over MongoDB and Redis;
• a serverless AWS architecture — Lambda for execution, SQS for asynchronous service-to-service workflows, S3 for assets and media;
• AWS Lex, adding conversational capabilities. Over the engagement, the product was re-platformed and moved cloud-native without disrupting live users.

Engineering worth naming

• No-code UX on enterprise-scale architecture. The hard part isn’t the drag-and-drop; it’s making it simple for a plumber while it scales to thousands of businesses underneath.
• One customer record, many services. Interconnected messaging, booking, payments, reviews and invoicing — the integration is the product, and it’s what a stack of point tools can’t do.
• Serverless and conversational. Lambda and SQS for scale and decoupling; Lex for conversational engagement.
• A six-year evolution, live throughout. Website builder to full platform, front end re-platformed, moved cloud-native — with 10,000+ businesses relying on it the whole time.

Results

• Scaled to support 10,000+ businesses, with websites now built self-service in 1–2 hours — no designers, no support tickets — and version control cutting the support load from accidental edits.
• One platform replaced a stack of disconnected tools — one contact record, one dashboard, a consistent customer experience.
• A platform that grew from a website builder into a complete business-management ecosystem without disrupting the businesses running on it.
• One of Toobler’s largest and longest-running engineering partnerships — build, scale and continuously evolve, for over six years.

What this means for SaaS product engineering

A SaaS product isn’t a project you ship and leave — it’s a years-long relationship of design, build, scale and continuous evolution, and the hardest part is doing all of that while real customers depend on it every day. GoSite is that pattern in practice: Toobler as the embedded product-engineering partner that took a website builder to an all-in-one, cloud-native platform serving 10,000+ businesses, and kept evolving it without disrupting a single user. If you run a SaaS or software product and need an engineering partner to build it, scale it, or re-platform it, talk to Toobler’s engineering team.