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Ravi Rai
Ravi Rai

Posted on • Originally published at buildbyravirai.com

We Built 3 Live Products Last Year. Here's What That Changes for Our Clients.

Most agency websites have a portfolio page that shows three logos and a few screenshots. The work might be five years old. Half the sites have been redesigned by someone else since. The agency has no skin in those projects anymore — they got paid, the client got code, the relationship ended.

We're a different kind of shop. Alongside our client work, we run three products in production. Real users. Real revenue. Real on-call shifts when something breaks at 11 PM. This post is about why that matters when you hire us.

Agencies that don't run their own software give you the version of advice they'd give themselves if their own money wasn't on the line. We built three products to make sure ours always is.

PlugEV — production OCPP for an EV operator

PlugEV is an EV charging station management system (CSMS) we built in 2024 and still run today. OCPP 1.6-J protocol. WebSocket gateway in Go. Laravel admin panel. 40+ chargers live across two cities. Real money flowing through it via Razorpay every day.

What that taught us — and what it means for you if you hire us:

  • Vendor APIs lie. Charger 1 says it's at 12 kW. The meter reads 8 kW. Charger 2 returns a status code that's not in the OCPP spec. We learned to never trust the data — verify, log, and reconcile against ground truth. Same applies to Razorpay webhooks, Shopify product feeds, or any third-party integration we build for you.
  • Real-time systems require ruthless monitoring. We caught a billing bug 6 hours after it started shipping wrong invoices because alerts were wired to actual outcomes (revenue mismatch) and not just CPU/memory dashboards. Every system we build for clients now has business-metric alerts, not just infrastructure alerts.
  • On-call discipline. PlugEV doesn't have a maintenance window. Cars charge at 2 AM. We learned how to run actual 24/7 production software — not just 'the website's up' but 'every transaction reconciles, every charger reports, every dispute has an audit trail.'

When you hire us to build your fintech, your fleet portal, your IoT-heavy app, or anything that needs real reliability — this is the experience you're buying. Not theoretical. Lived.

Need a CSMS, fleet portal, or any production-grade real-time system built? We've solved these problems already.See PlugEV details

CloudNX — cloud hosting for Indian developers

CloudNX is a managed cloud hosting platform we launched in 2026 — INR billing, Indian data centres, GST invoices, one-click deploys for Next.js, Laravel, and WordPress. We built it because we needed it for our own client deployments.

Running infrastructure-as-a-product made us deeply opinionated about hosting decisions on client projects:

  • We know exactly what shared hosting costs the client downstream. Most ₹99/month plans deliver 6-9 second mobile load times and quietly murder your Core Web Vitals. We've seen the numbers from the inside, and we won't ship a client to that fate.
  • We know which Indian-region cloud setups actually deliver low latency. The marketing says 'India region' for AWS Mumbai, GCP Mumbai, DigitalOcean Bangalore. The reality is wildly different at the network level. We've benchmarked all of them — for client projects, we recommend based on what we've measured, not what the marketing pages say.
  • Backups, SSL renewal, monitoring, log retention — we treat these as non-negotiable defaults because we run a hosting product where one missed backup means a customer lost their site. Our default for every client deploy now matches CloudNX's defaults.

If you hire us to ship a Shopify store, a Next.js marketing site, or a Laravel SaaS — your hosting and ops setup will be the same standard we hold our own product to.

Hosting your project on CloudNX is free for the first 3 months. No credit card required.See CloudNX details

ToolKiya — free online toolkit

ToolKiya is a free online toolkit — image converters, PDF tools, SEO utilities, calculators, generators. Browser-based, no signup, no upload limits. We built it as both a product and a public-facing demonstration of how fast and clean a Next.js site can be when SEO and Core Web Vitals are taken seriously.

Running ToolKiya means we ship every client site to the same standard:

  • Sub-second LCP on mobile. ToolKiya is fast because slow tools lose users. We built the same performance discipline into every client project — Lighthouse scores 90+ on mobile is the table-stakes minimum, not the goal.
  • SEO that actually ranks. ToolKiya competes for terms like 'free image compressor', 'PDF merger online', 'GST calculator'. To rank against the giants, our schema, content structure, and internal linking has to be precise. That same precision goes into every client site.
  • Tracking conversions, not vanity metrics. ToolKiya tracks tool-completion rates, not just pageviews. We instrument every client site the same way — form submissions, WhatsApp clicks, phone clicks, scroll depth. You'll see real conversion data, not just traffic.

ToolKiya is free and live. Use it as a demo of the kind of site we ship for clients.Visit ToolKiya

Why this matters when you hire us

There's a fundamental difference between an agency that ships and disappears versus one that runs the systems they build. We've experienced — at our own expense — every problem a client might face after launch:

  • We've been on the wrong end of a payment gateway webhook race condition that double-billed customers for 90 minutes. Now every Razorpay integration we build has idempotency keys and reconciliation jobs.
  • We've had to wake up to fix a production outage because a Cloudflare DNS change broke our staging environment. Now every client deploy has a rollback path that takes 30 seconds, not 30 minutes.
  • We've had a feature request from a real customer whose business depends on it. That changes how you write code. You stop building 'demo-quality' and start building 'this needs to work in 6 months when the original developer isn't here anymore.'

Almost every Indian web agency you talk to has never run their own software in production. They've shipped client sites — fine, important — but they've never had to maintain anything past the launch invoice. Their advice reflects that experience gap. Ours reflects our scars.

What this means for your project

  • If you're building a SaaS, a marketplace, or anything that needs real production reliability — we won't sell you a brittle MVP that breaks at month 3.
  • If you're choosing hosting, payment gateways, analytics tools, or any third-party — you'll get advice from someone who pays for those tools with their own money, not someone who's just read the docs.
  • If you're hiring us to maintain a project after launch — we treat your code with the same on-call discipline we apply to PlugEV. No 'submit a ticket and wait 5 days'.
  • If your project requires deep integration work (OCPP, Razorpay, Shopify, OAuth, third-party APIs) — we've already debugged the things that go wrong, on our own dime.

We're not the cheapest agency in India. We're not trying to be. What we are is the agency you hire when the project actually has to work, when the system actually has to scale, and when the people building it actually live with the consequences of what they ship.

Building something that needs to work past launch day? Tell us what you're working on. Quote in writing within 24 hours.Get a written quote

All three products in one place

  • PlugEV — plugev.in — production OCPP CSMS, 40+ chargers live, OCPP 1.6-J + Razorpay billing.
  • CloudNX — cloudnx.in — cloud hosting for Indian developers, free for first 3 months, INR billing, GST invoices.
  • ToolKiya — toolkiya.com — free online toolkit, 50+ utilities, no signup required.

Click into any of them. They're all live. They all work. They're how we prove what we can do — not with mockups and demo videos, but with software you can use today.

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