One team. Marketing, engineering and uptime.
JAK Solutions has been building and running digital systems for South African businesses since 2016. Not a marketing agency that outsources development. Not a dev shop that outsources marketing.
Competitive advantage lives where marketing meets technology.
Most businesses end up with three suppliers who each blame the other two. The marketer says the site is slow. The developer says the ads are badly targeted. The host says everything looks fine on their end. Meanwhile the checkout is still broken.
Built to convert. Engineered to stay up.
No vanity metrics — just real, defensible numbers from a decade of shipping and keeping systems alive.
Brands we've built, marketed and kept running.
A decade of work across healthcare, retail, manufacturing, hospitality and professional services — a selection of current and past clients.
— and more being added.
What working with us is actually like.
You get a person, not a ticket queue
One point of contact who knows your business, your stack and your history. No account manager relaying messages to a team you never meet.
Fixed scope, fixed price
You know what it costs before work starts. Scope changes are quoted separately rather than quietly absorbed into an invoice at the end.
You own everything
Code, content, hosting, analytics, ad accounts — all in your name. If you ever leave, you leave with everything. No lock-in.
We answer when it breaks
Care-plan clients get priority response, and incidents come with a root-cause explanation rather than "it's fine now".
Based in Cape Town. Working across South Africa.
Local enough to meet, set up for remote delivery anywhere in the country.
JAK Solutions
Cape Town, Western Cape
hello@jaksolutions.co.za
Monday – Tuesday – Wednesday – Thursday – Friday, 08:30–17:00
Areas we serve
Cape Town · Century City · Claremont · Sea Point · Green Point · Woodstock · Observatory · Constantia · Durbanville · Bellville · Milnerton · Table View · Somerset West · Stellenbosch · Paarl · Southern Suburbs · Northern Suburbs · Atlantic Seaboard
How we got here.
JAK Solutions was established in 2016 in Cape Town. Ten years and more than twenty brands later, the work still splits the same way: build the thing, market the thing, and keep the thing running.
Built across five sectors
Healthcare, retail, manufacturing, hospitality and professional services. A pharmacy, a brick and block supplier, a logistics operator and an accounting practice do not want the same website, but they all want the same thing from a supplier: it works, it stays up, and someone answers.
Marketing and engineering in one place
The combination was not a strategy on a whiteboard. It came from being called in to fix campaigns that were failing because of server response times, and sites that were fast but pointed at the wrong audience. After enough of those, splitting the two stopped making sense.
Hosting because it kept mattering
cPanel and LiteSpeed became home turf for the unglamorous reason that hosting is where most emergencies actually live. Load shedding, oversubscribed shared servers and expired certificates cost South African businesses real revenue, and you cannot fix any of it from the marketing side.
WordPress and WooCommerce are the default. Custom builds where a project genuinely needs it.
What we believe about building websites.
Six positions, held consistently. They shape the quotes, the contracts and what we tell you not to buy.
You own everything
On final payment the files, the content, the hosting, the analytics and the ad accounts are yours, in your name. Not held in an agency account you cannot log into. If you leave, you leave with the whole thing, and it keeps working without us.
Fixed price beats hourly surprises
Scope and price are agreed before work starts. Hourly billing pushes the risk of a bad estimate onto the client, and it makes every question you ask feel expensive. A fixed price means we carry the estimate risk, which is a strong incentive to scope carefully in the first place.
Speed is a feature, not a polish item
Most South African traffic arrives on a phone over mobile data, where data costs money and a heavy page costs sales. Performance is checked on mobile under real conditions before launch, not measured once on a desktop on fibre and declared fine.
Uptime is a feature too
A beautiful site that is down at 4pm on a Friday is worth nothing. Monitoring, backups and patching are treated as part of running a commercial website, not as an optional extra you discover the value of after the first outage.
No lock-in
Retainers and care plans are month to month with 30 days' notice. Nothing is engineered to be hard to leave. If a plan is only being renewed because cancelling would be painful, it is not a plan, it is a trap.
Honesty about what you do not need
Plenty of businesses are quoted a rebuild when they need three fixed pages and better tracking, or a retainer when they need one afternoon of work. Saying so costs a sale and earns the next three.
Who we work best with, and who we do not.
Qualification saves everyone a fortnight. We are a strong fit for owner-led South African businesses that treat the website as an operational system, and a poor fit for a few clearly identifiable situations.
A good fit
An honest mismatch
If it is not a fit, we will say so on the first call rather than three invoices in.
What happens when something breaks?
Stabilise first, then find the cause, then tell you what actually happened. On one recent server rescue that meant taking a load average of 44 down to 1.07 and then explaining, in writing, why it got there.
Restore service
The first job is getting the site answering again. That might be blocking a source of load, rolling back a bad update, restoring from a clean backup or moving the site off a host that is the problem. Diagnosis continues, but not while customers are staring at an error page.
Find the actual cause
A load average of 44 does not appear by itself. Something is doing it: an unbounded crawl, a plugin running a query per request, a compromised file, a cron job overlapping itself. We read the logs and identify the mechanism instead of restarting the server and hoping.
Close it properly
Fixing the symptom and leaving the door open guarantees a repeat. Patching the vulnerable component, rotating the credentials that were exposed, adding the limit that was missing, or moving the workload somewhere it belongs. Then verifying under the same conditions that caused the failure.
Write it down
You get a plain explanation of what broke, why, what was changed, and what will stop it recurring. "It's fine now" is not an answer. Care-plan clients get priority response, and root-cause analysis is written up on Commerce.
Tell us what you're trying to grow or fix.
Free first consult. A clear scope and a fixed price — no jargon, no retainer traps.