A tool we wanted, that didn’t exist.
SendTidings is a small product made by people who have spent the last decade running an agency. It’s the monthly-reports tool we kept wishing someone else would build — so eventually we did.
Why we’re building this
For nearly ten years we’ve been running Prystine, a web design and development agency in Didcot, Oxfordshire. Most of our clients are on retainers: we keep their sites fast, secure, and quietly improving in the background.
The work was good. The reporting was awful. Every first week of the month was the same: open four analytics tools, copy-paste numbers into a Google Doc, fight with the formatting, export a PDF, send an email apologising for the delay. The clients we cared about most got the report we were least proud of.
We tried Looker Studio. Tried Databox. Tried just sending links. None of them felt right: they all looked like dashboards, when what we actually wanted to send was a letter. Something warm, branded, finite. A postcard from each site, on the first of the month, every month.
So we built it. SendTidings is the product we wished existed when we were drowning in our own retainer admin.
Who’s behind it
SendTidings is built by Josh Cox, a creative developer based in Didcot, Oxfordshire. Josh founded Prystine in 2016 to bring a personal, plain-English approach to small-business websites, and ten years on the agency is still doing exactly that.
Outside of code, Josh is a former GB record holder in Olympic lifting and carried the Olympic torch in 2012. These days the lifting is more about staying upright than setting records, but the same instinct turns up in the work: small, deliberate movements, repeated until they’re right.
He also tinkers on a few other things: a Quotify price-estimator for builders, a plugin risk-scoring tool for WordPress, and an Olympic lifting magazine called Lifting Times. You can see the rest at joshcox.co.uk.
What we believe
- The email is the product. If the report doesn’t get opened, none of the data inside it matters.
- Plain English over jargon. Reports are for clients, not for your stack.
- Cadence is a feature. The first of the month, every month, on time. Predictable beats clever.
- Small and self-funded. We’re not raising. We want to make a tool we’d still want to use in ten years’ time.
- Open source on the way. A self-hostable AGPL build is planned. The hosted product pays the bills; the open source version makes sure you’re never trapped.
Where to find us
We’re based in Didcot, Oxfordshire: a quiet train ride south of Birmingham and west of London, depending which way the schedule sends us.
The fastest way to talk is email: hello@sendtidings.com. For something more personal, drop Josh a note at josh@sendtidings.com, or connect on LinkedIn.