The hosting and plumbing under my work is rented like everyone else's, but the tools I open every day are mostly my own. Over the past year I built them one product at a time, because the thing I needed did not exist in a form I liked, or cost more than it was worth for what I actually do. None of these started as products. They started as a problem on a Tuesday. Here is what I actually use, and why.
Orbit: the CMS and ops hub
Orbit is my own platform at portal.lverbeeck.com. The sites I build are static: plain HTML, CSS and JS, served from the edge with nothing to patch or get hacked. The catch with static sites has always been editing them. Orbit is the answer: client sites are edited in Orbit and publish straight to the live site on save, no WordPress admin, no deploy step for anyone but me to think about. It has grown past content editing into the ops side of running sites too: a leads inbox so form submissions land in one place, a client portal, and store management for the sites that sell things.
SendMerlin: for the inbox
Newsletter signup forms on about ten of my own sites feed into SendMerlin, with double opt-in so the list stays clean. It is also what sends cart-recovery emails for the stores I run on Orbit, the kind of email that only fires when someone adds something to a cart and leaves. I built it because I wanted that logic to live close to the sites themselves rather than in a separate marketing platform.
TrackTrendy: instead of Google Analytics
TrackTrendy is where I actually check traffic, on my own sites and on client sites. It is cookieless and privacy-friendly, so there is no cookie banner to add just for analytics. I built it because I wanted analytics I could hand a client without also handing them a cookie-consent problem.
Roundmark: for design feedback
Design review by email thread is miserable for everyone. With Roundmark I share a live URL or a screenshot and the client drops numbered pins directly on the thing with a comment attached, instead of "the button on the page, you know the one, third section down." It replaced what used to be a long, confusing back and forth with something that just points at the actual pixel.
RankMerlin: for search visibility
RankMerlin runs SEO and AI-search visibility audits on my own sites. It tells me where a page is weak for classic search and whether it is structured in a way an AI answer engine can actually read and cite, which is a different question than it used to be.
AuditMerlin: before a site goes anywhere near launch
Every scan on AuditMerlin runs fifteen security checks, eleven WCAG accessibility checks and three EU AI Act checks against a site. I run it before anything goes live, because catching a missing security header or an image without alt text before launch is a five-minute fix, and catching it after is a client email I would rather not get.
None of this is a sales pitch dressed as a blog post. These are products I use on my own work every day, built because I needed them and kept using because they still earn their place. If you want to see any of them in action on a real project, get in touch.