4 June 2026 6 min read Reserved for Felgate By Old Forge Technologies 45 reads Contents Some companies name their products after Greek gods, or after a clever word that two other words made when they collided. This one is named after a table we were only ever meant to borrow. Years ago, on a first date, my lovely wife and I set out for what was meant to be a short walk along the Felixstowe seafront. As the evening came in off the water, we ducked into [the Ferry Boat Inn](https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g503747-d3137066-Reviews-The_Ferry_Boat_Inn_Restaurant-Felixstowe_Suffolk_East_Anglia_England.html) to ask for a table - just somewhere to have a drink. They sat us at one and said it was ours for three hours, but that at six o'clock it was reserved. The card was already propped on it: *Reserved For Felgate, x2*. We got talking, the way you do on a good first date, and lost the thread of the clock. After an hour, a member of staff came back over: the Felgates had cancelled, and if we wanted the table for dinner, it was ours. So we stayed. A short seafront walk turned into a six-hour evening, on a table a couple we never met had given up without knowing it. The card came home with us. (Reader, we took the sign. It is pictured here, and it has lived in a drawer ever since.) We kept it because that evening turned out to be the start of everything - and because, said aloud, *Felgate* sounds like somewhere that has always existed. A fell, a gate, a way through. It sounded distinguished. It sounded like a name you could one day put over a door. [This week, we put it over a door.](https://felgate.co.uk) ## Why build it at all My lovely wife is a qualified nutritional therapist. When she was starting out - newly in business, with every overhead of a new practice arriving at once - she went looking for software to carry the admin of seeing clients: intake questionnaires, food diaries, notes, protocols, the steady work of keeping people on track between appointments. Exactly the sort of thing good software should shoulder for you. What she found is what most practitioners find in those early years. The established platforms are built, and priced, for practices with money to spare. When you are finding your feet, already paying for everything else it takes to run this kind of business, those monthly fees are a wall. You are asked to pay like an established clinic long before the cash flow of one arrives. I happen to like building systems. She described the problem; I started tinkering; her colleagues saw what I had put together and said what you rarely hear about this kind of software - *this is nicer than what we pay for.* She kept handing the same sentence back to me: if it were more affordable, and kinder to people in their first few years, there is a niche there. She was right, and it is precisely the thing Old Forge exists to do. ## The little shop deserves good tools Old Forge Technologies is a one-person workshop, and most of the people I build for are the same shape: the sole trader, the independent, the practitioner who is also the receptionist and the bookkeeper. I know the view from there. What strikes me about it is how often you are quoted a price that assumes you are ten times your size - software sold as though being small, or being new, were a premium tier you had chosen. It does not have to be that way. In 2026, with the tools now on the bench, there is no good reason a capable practice portal should be out of reach for someone in their first few years. That conviction is the whole company. Felgate is simply the latest place I get to act on it. ## What Felgate is A practice portal for nutritional therapy and functional-health practitioners. Each practice gets its own branded space - its own private corner of the system - with clients and questionnaires, food diaries and clinical notes, protocols and programmes, bookings, secure messaging and invoicing: the day-to-day of running a practice, gathered into one calm place. It is already doing the real work, already handsome, and there is a long list of things still to come. I will write about the machinery another time. There is genuinely interesting engineering under the bonnet - the kind I would rather give its own entry than flatten into a paragraph here. For today the point is simpler. It is live. The first public version of Felgate went up this week. ## A footnote from the workshop One small adventure, for the tinkerers. The domain, felgate.co.uk, was already taken and up for sale, which meant learning how `.uk` transfers actually work. They are not the tidy "here is a code, paste it in" you get with most domains. A `.uk` transfer turns on an IPS tag: you name the registrar that now holds the domain, and for me that tag was simply `IONOS`. It felt faintly absurd - IONOS is enormous, and there I was naming them as custodian and trusting the registry to know which of their millions of records was mine. I half-expected a fight. Instead I entered the domain, and there it was: matched, mine, done, presumably on the strength of the account behind it. Anticlimactic in the best way. The hardest part of acquiring Felgate was, fittingly, paperwork about a name. ## Reserved for Felgate So that is the story. A name borrowed from a table at the Ferry Boat Inn on the night everything started, given at last to something built for the practitioners the big vendors tend to look past. The card said *reserved* - held for someone who never arrived. It turns out it was holding the name for us, and the portal for every practitioner asked to pay like an established clinic in the years before they are one. The Felgates never showed. We will take good care of it for them. More soon. There is a great deal still on the bench.
