SaaS x WordPress.

PeakZebra brings you something even better than ‘no-code.’

Company projects… sort by column, reorder columns, click the pen to edit, click task list icon to view or add tasks. But the really important part is that you can evolve it for your unique needs…

{"addURL":"\/edit-project\/","editURL":"\/edit-project\/","taskListURL":"\/task-list\/","siteURL":"http:\/\/peakzebra.com"}

Different app, same (block) pieces. Here’s a simple to-do application that uses the same task block as the Projects tab.

{"addURL":"\/task-info\/","editURL":"\/task-info\/","appName":"todo","prj":"1"}

Yes, we absolutely do handle applications that deal with customers, clients, team members, paid subsribers, and so on. Notice how quickly it pages through the list. (No page reloads!)

[]

Easy applications. At our house*, not theirs.

*Or you can host the site if you prefer.

Start simple. Stay flexible.

We provide templates for applications, the sorts of apps that tackle basic problems. We then curate and extend the templates based on your specific needs.

Runs on WordPress, which powers 40% of the web and is trusted, capable, and performant. It’s your site, and you can change your PeakZebra apps to customize them, because they’re built from the same kind of block pieces that WordPress pages are built from.

Works like an application. Supports ‘outside’ users like an application.

Your web visitors can use these apps in the same way you do (if you choose). Those visitors can do more than look at lists and fill out simple forms. No extra charge for pointing part or all of your application out toward the world. You can even build full, customer facing SaaS apps with PeakZebra blocks.

You can configure lots of things within the WordPress editor. You can also put the Zebra to work.

Get started with a flat monthly rate for the initial heavy lifting, then take advantage of our flat-price menu of completely customized changes you can make to your PeakZebra applications. Queue as many changes as you like, we process them one by one, within two days (usually faster — see a live report of the current average time for request turnaround below…).

We do harder stuff too.

We’ll always work with you if you need to order something that’s off the menu. We’ll talk through your needs, then put together a quote for the project that’s well in line with current WordPress development rates.

What can you modify? Here’s the menu…

(Feel free to queue something up to see how the process works…)

Enqueue Request Description Level Actions
Add a field to an existing tableTell us what you\’d like the field to be called (that is, what appears above the edit field in a form or at the top of a column in a table.two
Create a calculated field (column) in a PZ database table.Add a column to a database table that is calculated using a formula that works with other fields in the table and possibly with other outside data (such as the current date).4
Create new custom tableNot a common request, but if you have a particular data set that doesn\’t lend itself to being stored in the preset data tables used by PZ, we can construct a new one to your specs.Custom
Change the name of a column in a PZ table in the databaseThis changes the name of the field in the database. It doesn\’t directly affect the name with which that field will appear in any forms or grids that use it. Usually, it\’s better to just change how the name appears as a prompt or column head in relevant grid and table blocks.3
Enqueue Request Description Level Actions
Add calculated display value to a form.If you want to show the extended value of an invoice item on a form, you could use this to show unit price multiplied by quantity.2
Change the layout of a form block.If you don\’t like the default order in which fields appear in a form, you can change that here, along with details such as whether fields appear in one column or two.3
Enable or disable standard validation for a form field.Use this when you want basic validation (phone number is all numbers and punctuation, for example) for field input. If it\’s on and you don\’t want it, use this request as well.1
Change or add placeholder text in form fieldPlaceholder text is the light gray text that appears in the input fields of forms before the user has added data. This text can be useful for giving users guidance about how to fill in that field.1
Add custom validation for form field.Custom validation enables you to ensure that the user is entering valid data in a form field. Usually, custom validation will take place on the server and the page will reload with an error message if the field entry isn\’t correct.3
Enqueue Request Description Level Actions
Change column order in grid blockMove around columns so that they display in the order you\’d prefer users saw them. Note that in the case of React-based grids, users will still be able to reorder columns on the fly, for that session only.3
Add or drop a column from a grid (table) display.This changes the display name at the top of a column. It does not change the actual field/column name within the PZ database.1
Change the CSS for elements of a grid (table) display.You can change the look of pretty much any element of a grid display in terms of color, margin, and interior padding.2
Change the name that appears at the top of a columnThis doesn\’t change the column name in the underlying database table, just the column display name. It\’s useful for using tables in different contexts.1
Enqueue Request Description Level Actions
Add dashboard display block.If you have a key metric either stored in a PZ table or calculated from data stored there, we can build a custom block to display that data as a number, gauge, or chart.4
Add new user role to access control block.If you create a new role that a user might have (not just subscriber, editor, and so on), this enables you to refer to that role in controlling access to a page.2
Add custom shortcodeCreates a shortcode either for an existing field in the PZ database that doesn\’t already have a shortcode or for a calculated or system-level value.3
Add or alter a conditional workflow branchWhen a form is submitted, different answers in the form can lead to redirecting to different pages.4

Current average turnaround time for queued requests: 3:40 business hours.

Diagram showing process of building apps with PeakZebra blocks.

Hi, I’m Robert…

Senior developer and founder of PeakZebra

PeakZebra is dedicated to helping you build applications and “app-like-things” in your WordPress environment. And it’s done using blocks, the key part of the “new era” of WordPress. Blocks for apps makes sense for a lot of reasons, including that:

  • They fit seamlessly into the normal content creation workflow
  • They are inherently “drag-and-drop” — for a no-code experience
  • These blocks talk to each other and tie into a per-configured set of database tables (architected to be up to 10x faster than custom post types and metadata fields)
  • Working with PeakZebra gives you a fixed monthly cost when you need it, then no cost at all when you don’t
  • It has some very “Airtable-like” features, but you don’t pay per seat, per month.

Just as WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg says “Code is Poetry” in the broader WordPress space, PeakZebra believes that Code is Content. Sure, traditional content is vital, but websites that do things, that have interactive tools, that perform work for you or your customers–these are what make the difference in an overcrowded web.

I highly recommend!

The approach PeakZebra takes to website development is quite innovative. I chose a template that had general characteristics that appealed to me, and then PeakZebra
tailored that site specifically to my business, based upon my input. The process was very efficient – I’ve never had such a simple, smooth experience with the development of my website. The cost was quite reasonable, and the time it took PeakZebra to have me up and running was quicker than any other site I have ever had developed.

The result was a very creative, professional site. I highly recommend PeakZebra for your website needs
Troy Berberick
Berberick Law

It’s your WordPress site… doing more than you expected.

Pricing: $495/mo. for initial rollout, hosting costs and fixed-price modifications thereafter.

There are things PeakZebra apps do that look somewhat like Airtable, but we like PeakZebra because it runs atop WordPress and because it acts more like an application than a Google Sheet. Neither Airtable nor Google Sheets give you much control over forms. They also don’t make it easy to check conditions in multiple tables before taking an action.

PeakZebra’s approach is different. Think of it as an entire database of interlinking data tables that store the data you need for typical business applications. You get a set of blocks that give you table-based views of this data, along with blocks that let you add and edit table data. You can drop these blocks into pages and posts on your site anywhere you want and surround them with anything else you can place in a WordPress page or post.

If you need, say, a different piece of data stored, or a form that gathers data in a different way, you request it and we supply you with a bespoke version of PeakZebra that handles your needs.

You probably can get whatever you’re up to done in Airtable, but you’ll have to wire up the different tables yourself and, at the end of the day, it’s going to work like a bunch of different table/grid views that you have to know how to edit to get the right results, not like a well-assembled (even if ad-hoc) application.

Just like any other part of WordPress, what typically happens when you step beyond ordinary maintenance and updates is that you wind up having to hire a developer. This is hard because there’s a shortage of them and they’re expensive (making $70k right up to $150k or so, plus benefits).

With PeakZebra, you use our help to create what is essentially a no-code capability to build and evolve application functionality on your website. We customize blocks for your specific data and processes. You then drag and drop the blocks.

It probably goes without saying, but this will be tens of thousands of dollars less expensive than hiring a developer to create a fully custom application for you. We’d encourage you to ask around and see what sorts of estimates you get.

Sites are generally hosted by PeakZebra, but you can host the site provided you’re comfortable with granting PeakZebra full admin access to the site and read/write access to the directories in which the site is stored. You do have to be running our installation of WordPress, which will be the latest version. Because WordPress is increasingly focused on the block paradigm and because of the added support requirements, we don’t work with sites that are created by “page builders” such as Divi, Elementor, and several others. We don’t have any beef at all with page builders, they just aren’t compatible with WordPress’s block approach. We can help you transition if you’d just as soon move to a block-based site.

Also, remember that this is a separate WordPress site from the existing (probably mostly marketing oriented) WordPress site you may have.

We’ll correct and modify anything we’ve done for you that you aren’t happy with, revising things as many times as needed until you’re happy. But there are generally no refunds. Note that our monthly rate is hardly going to risk your financial ruin.

That said, if you work with us on a more complex project that is quoted as a one-off project, our agreement there will include terms for payment and refunds that address the needs of both parties.

A few years ago, WordPress began migrating to an approach to building sites that uses “blocks” to build both the content of pages, headers and footers. It’s like third-party tools called “page builders”–products like Divi, BeaverBuilder, and Elementor–but it’s fully native to WordPress, not an overlay.

Developers can build specialty and custom blocks, so pretty much anything you can imagine as an element in a website could be a custom block. More often than not, there are already several blocks to choose from.

It’s clear that the future of WordPress lies with this block-based approach (which is also often called “Gutenberg,” it’s original project name).

PeakZebra leverages Gutenberg by building blocks that understand data records and application logic. We have a core set of pre-built blocks and we customize them for specific website uses, making the process much faster than developing from scratch.

We’ll change it to do what it should. Of course, there are things a person can dream of that can’t be achieved on a WordPress platform, but for ordinary, data-centric applications, we iterate until we get it right.

It depends, of course. If you are using an existing template and it basically does what you want, then you can be up and kicking within a few days. The grander your vision, though, the longer it will take: weeks or even months (though you may be getting use out of it during that period).

We can give you a much better sense of the time commitment in an initial Zoom call.

Yes, we’d love that. Agencies work with us just like non-agency clients, at the regular $495 rollout rate and flat-price change requests thereafter. But when you sell through to a client, we charge you $39/year for that site’s license (you can charge the client at whatever price point you prefer). There are details, a few at least, so give us a yell and let’s talk.

Absolutely, but we have a special arrangement for SaaS development. PeakZebra is architected to support multi-tenant use cases of the sort that SaaS applications typically use, but our standard blocks don’t expose this capability. Additionally, you will almost certainly need more bespoke programming and quite likely the development of a few completely custom blocks (and maybe special configurations of your WordPress site as well). So let’s talk and see how well we mesh with your project. If nothing else, we can probably give you some (free) guidance on how to approach what you’re doing in WordPress.

Actually, yes. We even have a pretty fancy system (proprietary) for managing the process. We change (where needed) the code for individual clients. But we also propagate changes to the main line of the code (patches, feature additions) to the individual client’s modified version. Crazy, right?

Short answer: they are secure.

Longer answer: they are secure for a couple of important reasons. The first is that WordPress is secure. Sure, the platform gets criticism because you do hear about WordPress sites getting hacked here and there. But remember that WordPress powers 40% of the Internet’s sites, so the target is huge and it includes sites that aren’t up to date and use less-than-convincing add-ons. But a lot of big sites (Whitehouse.gov, to take one example) trust it’s security.

Second, PeakZebra blocks are designed with security in mind, what’s more, when you have an active support license with us, your site will run a security monitor that routinely doublechecks the integrity of the blocks on your site with a server we run specifically for that purpose. You won’t be aware of it unless something is amiss, but if anyone manages to tamper with PeakZebra blocks, we’ll catch the problem straight away.

We’re not aware of any other WordPress plugin or theme software that offers this capability.