Say the expensive truth early
If your plan will not work, if the budget is short for the scope, or if you do not need the thing you asked for, you hear it on the first call. Late honesty is just a bigger invoice with an apology attached.
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Ten years of cleaning up other people's shortcuts.
Next Wave Digital Agency LLC is a design and engineering studio on Islington Street in Toledo, Ohio. We are small on purpose, and we keep the work we ship.
Our story
It began with a rescue, and it never really stopped.
In the spring of 2016 a family run auto parts distributor two streets over lost their website. Not slowly: an unpatched plugin, a script kiddie, and eleven years of product data gone in an afternoon. Their agency had folded. Nobody had a backup.
Getting them back online took eleven days. What stayed with us afterwards was not the technical fix. It was how ordinary the story was. Someone had sold that business a website as a one time purchase, taken the payment, and left it sitting on the public internet with nobody watching it.
Next Wave was set up to work the other way round. We design and build carefully, we harden what we build, and then we stay and look after it. The maintenance is not a bolt on we sell at the end. It is the reason the build is worth paying for at all.
Ten years on, the studio is still deliberately small. A design lead, four engineers, a security lead and a project manager. We take on a limited number of new builds each quarter because the care work we already carry is a real commitment, not a line item.
Our clients are Ohio manufacturers, medical practices, logistics firms and software companies from Portland to Providence. The common thread is that they all need the thing to keep working on a Tuesday morning when nobody is thinking about it.
By the numbers
Small studio, long records.
We publish these because most agencies will not. Ask us for the detail behind any of them on a call.
112sites and applications shipped since 2016
64properties under an active care plan
99.98%average uptime across managed sites
7people, and it stays that way
Timeline
How the studio got here.
A short version. The long version involves a lot of coffee from the place on Adams Street.
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2016
Two people and a rescue job
Founded above a print shop on Islington Street. First year revenue came almost entirely from repairing and rebuilding sites other people had abandoned.
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2018
The first care plans
We stopped selling one off builds. Every project since has shipped with a maintenance agreement attached, or we have not taken the project.
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2020
Everything moved online at once
Twelve clients needed ordering, booking or payment systems in under three months. That year pushed us properly into custom software rather than brochure sites.
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2022
Security became its own practice
We hired a dedicated security lead and started running our own penetration tests instead of subcontracting them. Audits and incident response opened up as standalone work.
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2024
A design system of our own
We rebuilt our internal component library so client projects start from tested, accessible parts. Build times dropped by roughly a third without cutting anything.
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2026
Seven people, sixty four sites
Still on Islington Street. Still turning down work we cannot look after properly. The plan is to stay this size and get better rather than get bigger.
A website nobody maintains is not an asset. It is an unlocked door with your logo on it.Our founding principle, written on the studio wall in 2016 and never amended
How we work
Four rules we do not bend.
These decide which projects we take, how we price, and what we tell you when the honest answer is inconvenient.
Own what we ship
The people who designed and built your site are the people who maintain it. Nothing is handed to a support queue that has never seen the code.
Secure by default, not on request
Hardening, backups, patching and monitoring are in every build at every price. Security is not an upgrade we hold back to sell you later.
Leave you able to leave
You own your code, your content, your domains and your accounts. Everything is documented so another team could pick it up. Clients stay because staying is worth it.
Come and see whether we are a fit.
A first call takes thirty minutes, costs nothing, and ends with a straight answer about whether we are the right studio for the job.