How Grafter works

You describe it once, in your own words

There is one box on the front page. Say what you do, where you do it and who you do it for — the way you would say it to somebody standing in front of you, not the way you think a computer wants to hear it. Longer helps; clever does not. If you have a logo or photographs of your own work, attach them here: uploads are the only pictures of yours that can end up on the site.

What you type: I fit and repair garden fencing round Norwich. Twelve years at it, mostly private homes, a few schools.

It decides the rest, rather than asking

It does not stop to ask you anything. Where your description leaves something out it makes the obvious call and builds, because a turn that only asks is a turn you paid for and got no site from. Colour, section order, tone of voice and which sections exist at all are settled that way every time — so anything you would mind being wrong belongs in that first message. What it will not do is invent your facts. A phone number, a registration number or a rating it was not given is left as a plainly marked gap with a line saying what it needs.

What it settles for you: Colours, section order, tone of voice, and which sections the site has at all.

It writes the site while you watch

Not a spinner and a percentage. Files appear one at a time with their real names, and the text streams into them as it is written — you can read the words on your own about page before the build has finished. The preview beside the conversation runs the site as it stands, so you are looking at the thing itself rather than at a description of it. If it is clearly heading somewhere wrong, stop it and start again rather than sitting through the rest.

What it says back: I've written it as a Norwich business — say the word and I'll change the area.

You change anything by asking for it

There is no dashboard to learn and no settings screen where the thing you want is three menus deep. Say what is different, in the words you would use on the phone. It rewrites only the files that actually change and leaves the rest exactly as they were, so asking about the header cannot quietly restyle the rest of the site. Two other modes sit in the same menu: Plan, which tells you what it would build before you spend a turn watching it, and Bug fix, which goes after the cause of something broken instead of redesigning around it.

What you type: Drop the bit about our mission, put the phone number in the header, and use the fence photo I sent at the top.

You take it with you

Download the whole project as a zip and it runs anywhere — it is a standard React app, it is yours, and it keeps working whether or not you keep paying us. Or push it straight to a private GitHub repository, or put it online through your own Vercel account. The access token you paste to do that is used for the one publish and then thrown away; we never keep it.

What you end up with: grafter-site.zip in your Downloads folder, or a live address on an account that belongs to you.

What it cannot do

It cannot invent your phone number

Nor your email, your address, your registration numbers, your insurance, your star rating or how many years you have been trading. It is instructed never to write a plausible one — a made-up registration number on a live site is a trading standards problem, not a typo. Where it has no real value it leaves a plainly marked gap and tells you what it needs from you.

It cannot know your prices

Give it your numbers and it uses them exactly as written. Leave them out and it writes figures that look sensible for your trade — sensible is not the same as yours. Read every price on the page before anybody else does.

It cannot take your photographs

It draws what it needs — gradients, type, SVG it writes itself — and never pulls in a stock photo or links to an image on somebody else's site. Pictures of your actual work are the one thing that makes a site unmistakably yours, and they have to come from your phone.

It does not make native mobile apps

Everything it builds is a website: React and plain CSS, running in a browser, at an address you can text to someone. Nothing here ends up on the App Store or Google Play. If that is what you came for, this is the wrong tool, and it is cheaper to find that out now than after three builds.