AI chat assistant and self-serve SaaS, built in Belfast
Athena is our own product. It's an AI chat assistant that answers customer questions, recommends products and passes real leads to a human team at any hour of the day. We designed it, built it and turned it into a self-serve SaaS business with free trials, Stripe billing and an answer engine that improves itself without going rogue.
Athena in numbers
The challenge: from bespoke to product
We kept rebuilding the same chatbot foundations for one client after another.
Athena started life as bespoke work. We had built chatbots for individual clients, including BotTom for Tom Morrison, and underneath it was the same job every time. Train it on the client’s content, keep it in the client’s voice, and make sure it knows when to fetch a human.
After the third or fourth build the honest answer was that this should be a product rather than a bespoke job.
Self-serve was the part that needed real thought. A product anyone can sign up to has to be safe in the hands of somebody who has never configured an assistant before. It has to refuse questions it has no business answering, be obvious when it is guessing, and never invent a returns policy because a customer asked confidently enough.
Our approach: chat that keeps people
Most website chat is designed to get rid of people. We wanted to build something that kept them.
Athena is trained on a business’s own pages, price lists, policies and FAQs, so the answers sound like their best team member instead of a script. It carries the client’s name, colours and tone of voice, so visitors never see a third-party widget. When a question needs a person, it says so, takes the details and brings someone into the same conversation without losing any of the context.
Everything it learns goes through approval before it goes live. Athena Reflect proposes new answers out of real conversations and a human signs them off, which is how the answer engine improves without anybody finding out the hard way what it decided to say.
The whole thing is self-serve. A business can start a free trial, pick a plan and be live without ever speaking to us, although the Belfast team is there to train it, install it and stay on hand for anyone who would rather we did the work.
What we built into Athena
Athena began as the same bespoke job repeated. Turning it into a product meant building the parts nobody asks for until something goes wrong.
Trained on your own content
Athena reads a business’s pages, price lists, policies and FAQs, so answers come from what that business has actually published rather than from the open web.
Live human handover
When a question needs a person, Athena says so, takes the details and brings a colleague into the same conversation with the history intact.
Athena Reflect
New answers are proposed out of real conversations and held for a human to approve, so the assistant improves without anybody signing off on a guess.
Self-serve onboarding and billing
A business starts a free trial, picks a plan and goes live without speaking to us. Stripe handles subscriptions and conversation top-ups through Laravel Cashier.
White-labelled widget
It carries the client’s name, colours and tone, and installs from a packaged client library, so visitors never see somebody else’s badge on it.
Privacy and audit trail
Personal detail is stripped before anything is stored, every conversation is logged for review, and Cloudflare Turnstile keeps automated traffic out.
The Tech-Spec
A Laravel product built in three parts: the marketing and billing site, the AI engine that runs the conversations, and an installable client package that drops the widget onto any site. Subscriptions, trials and conversation top-ups all run through Stripe using Laravel Cashier.
HTML5, Tailwind CSS, Vue.js, GSAP, Lenis, Vite
Laravel (MVC framework), Laravel Cashier, LarAgent
Stripe subscriptions & usage top-ups, self-serve onboarding, live human handover, Athena Reflect approval workflow, PII stripping, audit trail, Cloudflare Turnstile, embeddable client package
Services on this project
Most of our clients use more than one.
AI integration
Chatbots, automations and internal tools wired into the systems you already run, answering from your own information rather than guessing.
→ 02Web applications
Software that does a job for the business rather than describing it. Members platforms, custom admin software and internal tools built around how the work actually gets done.
→ 03Digital product roadmap
Scoping and planning before anyone writes code, so the build has a shape and a price.
→More work
A few of the other projects we have built.
