My day job is enterprise software used by hundreds of thousands of people every day. Your website gets the same engineer.
Templates from $1,500. On-call from $99 a month. Pricing you can read in one breath.
Your site was built by a cousin, a Squarespace weekend, or an agency that stopped answering.
The hours are wrong. The menu is a PDF from last spring. The phone number rings a line nobody picks up.
Someone checked, gave up, and went to the place down the street with a website that worked.
It should be the easiest part of running the place.
A restaurant website has four jobs: hours, address, menu, and a way to reach you. Everything else is garnish. Most sites get the garnish right and the drink wrong.
I'm a software engineer in the Chicago suburbs. By day I build enterprise software at HubSpot that hundreds of thousands of people rely on. The rest of my time goes to whiskey: I'm Whiskey with Maks, I run the Craft Whiskey Collective, and I pick barrels with distilleries.
Somewhere in there I noticed that the bars I love had websites that didn't love them back. Nightcap Digital is the fix: engineer-grade websites for the industry I already spend my nights in.
I keep the process easy: a conversation at your bar, not a slide deck, and I'm faster by text than by email. The work is another matter. You're paying for something that has to hold up on a Friday night, and I build it like my name is on it, because it is.
Based in Naperville. Working across Chicagoland, and anywhere with wifi.
The engineer
I'm a professional software engineer. My day job is enterprise software at HubSpot, where I'm a Tech Lead, used by hundreds of thousands of people every day. That's the standard your site gets: built by someone whose work isn't allowed to go down, not someone who learned websites last spring.
The insider
I'm also in your world. I run a whiskey community and pick barrels with distilleries. I've tasted most of what's on your back bar and I know what your regulars will order twice. You won't have to explain your whiskey list to me.
The guest
A website is the first time a guest walks into your place. It should feel like your room before they've stepped inside. And when they need something, whether that's hours, directions, the menu or a table, it's one tap away on whatever phone they're holding.
The outcome
Every place has a few things it wants people to notice: the back bar, the tasting night, the patio in July. I build the site around what matters most to you, and change it as that changes. The site you launch with shouldn't be the site you have a year later.
You get my number. When something breaks, the person who built it fixes it.
Three to start, each built for a kind of place: a cocktail bar, a taproom, a neighborhood restaurant. Bring your logo, your photos, and your menu. Don't have great photos? Say so. We'll sort it out.
See the templatesYour content, your colors, your domain. About a week for a template. Custom sections when they earn their place, not because they look busy. Bring your designer's files and I'll build to them. Need design? I'll quote it. I don't design logos.
A phone-friendly editor for menus, hours, and specials. Hosting, monitoring, and a human on call, for one monthly fee. When something breaks, you text me. That's the whole process.
Every template is a live site. Click through it the way your guests would, then picture your menu, your photos, and your name on it.
Cocktail bar, with an optional café or bakery out front
A bakery by day with a hidden cocktail, wine, and vinyl bar behind it. Pull the record on the shelf and the door opens. Without a front venue, it's a cocktail bar with the records, the whiskey list, and the Now Playing pill as its home page.
Brewery & taproom
Bright, loud, and built around the tap board: what's pouring, what's new, what's about to kick, and which food truck is out front today. The same data prints as a clean one-page tap list.
Neighborhood restaurant
Warm and photo-first, like a magazine feature about the place. The menu page opens on whatever's being served right now, with brunch, dinner, happy hour, and wine as tabs, plus private dining and a story page.
Distillery & tasting room
Paper and copper: the lineup as a catalog with proof, age, and mash bill on every bottle, tastings and tours to book, and where to buy a bottle nearby. Age gate built in.
Log in from your phone. Edit a price, 86 a dish, flip the hours for a holiday, post tonight's pour. It's live in seconds. No rebuild, no ticket, no invoice.
What you can't break: the layout, the design, and the parts Google cares about. Those are locked. On purpose.
If it's more than a two-minute change, text me. If it's new work, I'll quote it. See pricing
Two numbers: one to build it, one to keep it running. Anything new after that is hourly.
A template, filled with your content.
Prefer nothing upfront? Template is $229 a month for twelve months, then $99.
Timeline: About a week
Best for: A bar or restaurant that needs a good site now.
Not included: Layout changes or custom sections. (That's Tailored.)
Most places
A template, styled to your brand, with the sections you need.
Timeline: 2–3 weeks
Best for: Places with a strong brand, or something a template doesn't cover: private events, a tap list, a story worth telling.
Designed and built around how your business runs.
Timeline: Scoped
Best for: Groups with several locations, distilleries with a lineup and a club, anyone whose website does real work.
How it's priced. Each of those adds to the build, and most add to the monthly, because there's more running and more that can break. You get one fixed quote for both before anything starts.
Running costs. Some features rely on outside services (sending email, text messages, payment processing). Those are passed through at cost, itemized on your invoice. No markup.
One rule for every tier: bring your designer's files and there's no design fee.
I don't design logos. Bring one you love.
$99 for Template, $149 for Tailored, from $249 for Custom. The price follows how much I'm keeping running. On-call is insurance, not a bucket of hours.
On Template and Tailored, the monthly price is all-in. On Custom, outside service costs are passed through at cost.
Hosting, SSL, updates, and monitoring around the clock. I usually know it's down before you do.
Outages, errors, and broken links, fixed. No invoice. Site down: I'm on it within four hours. Anything else: next business day.
The editor for menus, hours, and specials, so you never wait on me. Plus two quick fixes a month, anything under fifteen minutes.
Your numbers, every month, by text, in plain English.
What it isn't: New pages, features, redesigns, or integrations. Those get quoted and billed hourly.
If it broke, it's on-call. If it's new, it's hourly. If it's the menu, it's you, and it takes two minutes.
For the things that aren't broken and aren't in the editor: a private-events page, a new integration, a menu overhaul you'd rather hand off, a redesign.
Live, with real users, and still running. That's the difference between "can build a website" and "has kept one running."
The site for a members' whisky bar in Wheaton, and the fully fledged member management portal behind it: memberships and payments through Square, door access through Kisi, and events through Eventbrite.
A storefront for whiskey groups' barrel picks. Each group gets its own page, and the pipeline from "barrel picked" to "in stock" updates itself.
A daily whiskey quiz in the Wordle mold, for people who take the back bar seriously.
A Discord bot that runs a whiskey community: barrel ratings and leaderboards, blind tastings, an events calendar, and barrel status synced to the shop. It runs on the same stack your website would.
Every one of these is something I answer for at 11pm. Your site would be too.
Text me. Tell me the name of the place and what's bugging you about the site. I'll get back to you the same day, usually faster. If you'd rather talk it through in person, I'm easy: your bar, a good pour, and we'll figure out what you actually need. Sometimes the answer is "you don't need me for that." I'll tell you.
Text MaksEmail works too, but I'm faster by text: contact@nightcapdigital.com
Or send the form
Got it. I'll text you today. If you'd rather meet, tell me where you're pouring.Got it. I'll email you today. If you'd rather meet, tell me where you're pouring.