Why I Built Another Website Feedback Tool
The world doesn't need another feedback tool. I know that. There are dozens of them, and I've tried most of them. But here I am anyway, shipping one.
Here's why.
The spreadsheet era
For years I've been building websites for clients. Laravel, Vue, the usual stack. The actual building part? I love that. The feedback part? Absolute nightmare.
It always starts the same way. You deploy to staging, send the link, and wait. Then it begins. An email with "the button on the left doesn't work." Which button? Which page? On mobile or desktop? No idea. A WhatsApp message with a blurry screenshot that's been compressed three times. A Slack thread where four people are talking over each other about different issues on different pages.
I tried to organise it. I made a shared Google Doc once. It turned into 30 pages of screenshots and vague notes within a week. I tried a Trello board. Nobody used it because the client didn't want to learn Trello just to tell me a heading was the wrong colour.
The feedback itself was never the problem. Clients always know what they want changed. They just have no good way to tell you. So it comes through every channel imaginable, with no context, and you spend more time deciphering what they meant than actually fixing it.
The tool search
So I looked at what was out there. There's no shortage of website feedback tools. The problem is that most of them aren't built for someone like me.
Some are built for large agencies. Twenty-person teams, enterprise procurement, SSO, role-based permissions. Pricing starts at £50/month before you've even added a second project. Features I'll never use, and a price that's hard to justify when you're a solo dev managing a handful of client sites.
Others are built for designers. Pixel-perfect annotation, live CSS editing, visual collaboration. Great if you're a design agency reviewing mockups. Not so great if you're a developer who just needs a client to point at something and say "this is wrong" with enough context to actually fix it.
And almost all of them felt heavy. Dashboards with dozens of menu items, onboarding flows that take 15 minutes, features piled on features until the tool itself needs a tutorial. I don't want a platform. I want something that works.
What I actually needed
When I stripped it back, what I needed was pretty simple:
A widget that sits on my staging site. My client clicks on something, leaves a comment, and it captures a screenshot with all the technical context: browser, screen size, page URL, the element they clicked on. That feedback lands somewhere I can actually act on it. Done.
No accounts for the client to create. No browser extension for them to install. No training call to explain how the tool works. They visit the site, they click, they comment. That's it.
And on my end, I want that feedback in my actual workflow, not in yet another dashboard I have to check. If it lands as a GitHub issue with the screenshot and metadata attached, I can triage it alongside my other work without context-switching.
That's the tool I wanted. Simple, fast, developer-first, and cheap enough that I wouldn't think twice about the subscription.
So I built it
Lairo is the feedback tool I wished existed when I was knee-deep in client revision hell.
You add one line of code to your site. Your client visits, clicks the widget, and leaves feedback with an annotated screenshot. Every submission captures the browser, OS, screen size, and page URL automatically. No signup for your client, no extension to install.
On your side, feedback is organised per project with status tracking, filtering, and priority levels. It integrates with the tools you already use so you're not adding another tab to your workflow.
It's not trying to be everything. No heatmaps, no session recordings, no NPS surveys, no live CSS editing. It does one thing: collects clear, contextual website feedback from people who aren't developers. And it does that without getting in anyone's way.
The honest pitch
Lairo is free to start. No credit card, no time-limited trial. If you're a developer building sites for clients and you're tired of decoding vague emails and chasing feedback across five different channels, give it a go. Drop the script tag on your staging site and send the link to your most difficult client. One round of feedback and you'll know if it's worth it.
I'm building this solo, so if something breaks or you need something, you're talking to me directly. No support ticket queue. I'm genuinely interested in what works and what doesn't, so don't hold back.