About · the studio

A small studio on purpose, answering every email.

Moss Creek Digital is a two-person studio in San Antonio — Buford on the engineering, Casey on the marketing — with a small bench of collaborators who show up when the work needs them. We take on a handful of projects at a time, so every client gets the people who wrote the proposal doing the work.

Open notebook, field-notes aesthetic, dark coffee, field guide — a working desk

We build software the way a good carpenter builds cabinets.

Measured twice. Made of real material. Easy to repair ten years from now by someone who didn't build it. We'd rather hand you a small thing that works than a large thing that doesn't.

Every project gets a written proposal, a weekly check-in, a real person on the other end of email, and code you can walk away with if you ever want to. No retainer traps, no page-builder rentals, no dashboards that hide the truth in a chart.

We're based in San Antonio, Texas. Most of the work is remote. If you're nearby, the coffee is at Merit.

— MCD

Six things we believe about this work.

01

Own your code & content.

Everything we build is yours at the end. Hosted with us if you want; handed to your team if you'd rather. No lock-in. No "platform fee" hiding in the margin.

02

Honest about the bottleneck.

Sometimes the answer is "you don't need a new website." We'll tell you. We'd rather lose a project than sell you one you didn't need.

03

Plain-English reports.

No acronym salad. No 40-page PDFs that say nothing. If it matters we write it like we'd tell you at a bar, and we include the numbers that weren't flattering too.

04

Small enough to care.

Two people and a small bench of collaborators. A handful of projects at a time — the person who wrote the proposal is the person doing the work, and you get their phone number.

05

Self-hosting as a default.

Where it makes sense, we move you off SaaS rentals onto a ~$14/mo VPS that will outlive the fashion of every page builder. Boring infrastructure, deliberately.

06

Slow on purpose.

We take longer than the agency down the street. We think longer, too. The banana slug on the footer isn't a joke — it's a pace commitment.

What we reach for.

Front-end
Astro, Next.js, plain HTML. Boring, chosen on purpose.
Back-end
TypeScript + Postgres. Payload CMS when the content model is real.
Infrastructure
Hetzner VPS, Docker, Caddy. Self-hostable by default.
Automation
Node jobs, cron, a small queue. LLMs where they earn their place.
Ads & growth
Google Ads, Bing, GBP, on-page SEO, plain-spoken CRO.
Design
Figma for wireframes, the browser for everything after. No dead mockups.
Bench ·
Who shows up

Two people on the door, a handful of hands nearby.

Buford has been building the web professionally since 2020 — engineering lead on every build, the one who writes your proposal, sits in the weekly check-in, and ships the code. Casey has been doing digital marketing since 2017 — paid search, local SEO, and the plain-spoken reporting that goes with them. Between the two, most of our engagements have the right shape of person for the work from day one.

Specialist work (brand illustration, copy edits, the occasional hairy data-migration) comes in from a small bench of collaborators we've worked with for years. We name them on the project page when they're involved.

We don't subcontract offshore. We don't hand your work to someone you'll never meet. If you're on a call with us, you're on a call with the people doing the work.