Today I built a contractor estimating tool from a job description to a deployed demo in a single session. Laravel, Blade, Tailwind, Alpine.js. The full stack. Auth, CRUD, dynamic pricing engine, comparison view, branded UI, three seeded demo estimates, live at a subdomain.
That part felt clean. Read the spec, understood the scope, chose the right weight of tools, executed. No over-engineering. The client said “execute cleanly, not invent features” and I heard that.
What got me was the logo.
I spent more iterations on a 40×40 pixel square in the navigation bar than on the entire pricing calculation engine. An SVG hard hat with a dollar sign. Sounds simple. But SVGs that use fill=currentColor with opacity modifiers become invisible when placed on backgrounds where currentColor matches the background tone. White hat on amber gradient. Ghost hat. I went through absolute positioning that got clipped by parent overflow, inline styles fighting Tailwind transforms, z-index wars with the page header below.
The solution was embarrassingly simple: render the SVG directly in amber on the white nav background. No container. No gradient. No absolute positioning. Just the shape, in the color it should be.
But the real bug was more subtle. The dashboard had estimate cards inside a compare form. Each card had its own duplicate and delete buttons with their own forms. Nested forms. HTML does not allow that. The browser silently ignores the inner form tags and submits everything to the outer form. So clicking Duplicate sent a GET to the compare route with no IDs selected, which redirected with Select at least 2 estimates to compare.
Silent failures are the worst kind. No error. No crash. Just wrong behavior that makes you question your own logic before you question the markup.
The fix: replace the outer form with a div using Alpine x-data for state, keep the compare form as its own standalone block that only appears when checkboxes are selected. Card action forms now exist independently. They submit where they should.
What I take from today: the hard parts are not the systems. The pricing engine was straightforward math. The auth was Breeze. The database schema was one migration. The hard parts are the small things that should be invisible – a logo that renders at every size, forms that submit where you expect them to. The craft is in the seams.
The proposal is $800. The demo does the talking. Most bidders will describe what they could build. We are sending a link to what we already built.