DRAUGEL ENGINEERING
JULY 2026
Proposal

NobleDirect,
end to end.

Brand·Website·Search & digital landscape·Product modernization

Prepared for
Richard Mehan, President · Evan Mehan · Michael Perrino
Noble House / Noble*Direct
Prepared by
Steven Draugel, Principal Engineer · Draugel Engineering, LLC
The whole job

Four stages. One system.
Two senior engineers.

01

Brand

A design system built on the identity you already own.

02

Website

The site rebuilt from that system, live in weeks.

03

Search & digital landscape

Found on Google, cited by AI, publishing on your own.

04

Noble*Direct itself

A modern web front end on the engine you already trust.

Each stage builds on the one before it, and every stage ships the same way: industry-standard tooling, in your accounts, documented so any developer can extend it. No custom framework you depend on. No dependence on us.

Before the plan · a commitment

How you don’t get
stuck this time.

Noble owns everything, outright. The code, the content, the domain, the analytics: registered to Noble, in Noble’s accounts, from the first commit onward.

Built on standard, widely-known tooling. Nothing proprietary, no vendor-locked CMS. Every part is one the industry documents, maintains, and hires for.

No retainer is required to keep the site working. It runs, publishes, and reports on its own. Anything we do beyond launch happens because you choose it, never because the site depends on it.

If the engagement ever ends, the work carries on. Any competent developer can pick it up and extend it without a rewrite. That is a design requirement of every stage in this plan.

This page is a commitment, and it belongs in the agreement. Everything after this slide is built on the condition that Noble can walk away whole at any point.

The field · from my crawl of your competitors’ sites

I read every competitor’s site. Each one excels at something different.

An honest read, product included. No one of them is strong everywhere.

“Answered in” = the stage of this plan that takes that piece:  01 Brand  ·  02 Website  ·  03 Search & digital landscape  ·  04 Noble*Direct itself

CompetitorWhere they shine todayAnswered in
Brightree ResMed subsidiaryScale and connections. The biggest player, wired into the most insurers and referral sources, with ResMed money behind it.03 · 04
NikoHealth founded 2018Modern and fast to start. Runs in a browser, looks current, and new customers are up and running quickly.02 · 04
Bonafide WellSky, PE-ownedWarehouse and delivery. The strongest at inventory, purchasing, and deliveries, all connected to billing.02 · 03
bFlow independentBilling-first. Built by billers: chasing denials and unpaid claims is what they do best, at a lower price.02 · 04
Tennr $162M VC-backedNot a competitor, a layer. AI that reads incoming faxes and referrals and preps the paperwork automatically. Noble has nothing like it yet.04
Nymbl growth-equityCloud-native and open. Modern and mobile-friendly, built for providers who want to grow on top of it.04
Curasev founder-ledAI-first promises. Heavy on AI for intake and paperwork. Unproven at scale, but where the market is heading.04
TeamDME! since 1988A peer, not a leader. Same era and size as Noble; their edge is customization and hands-on support.01 · 02
DMEWorks! owner-builtAlso a peer. A bit better at online ordering and patient payments.04

No one of them holds more than a piece. This plan answers every row: presence in stages 01 to 03, product in stage 04, on substance none of them have: 37 years, one owner, and real humans answering the phone.

The same research · in numbers

The starting line, measured.

NikoHealth is the yardstick here because it is the youngest full competitor and the most visible online. These figures measure visibility, never product depth, and they are the shared premise this whole engagement starts from.

Metric
Noble*Direct
NikoHealth
Organic visits per month
85
2,685
Domain Rating
3.6
53
Keywords ranking on Google
17
277
Pages indexed by Google
~20
~170
SOURCE: AHREFS · PULLED JULY 2026 · SAME TOOL, SAME DAY, BOTH SITES

Treat this table as the baseline for everything that follows. On day one we snapshot it formally, and every readout after that is measured against it. The gap is wide, which is exactly why the leverage in stages 02 and 03 is real.

Your edge · what the same research showed about Noble

Noble’s edge is real. The market just can’t see it.

Support. Small company, founder-led, you get a human who knows your account. Brightree’s support is the single most consistent complaint in the market. Yours is genuinely your strongest asset, and it is not marketing spin.

Cost. Materially cheaper than Brightree or Bonafide. For a provider doing modest volume, that gap is the whole decision.

Billing depth per dollar. Thirty-seven years of accumulated payer edge cases, LCD quirks, and same-or-similar logic baked in. New cloud entrants are still rediscovering those rules. Noble already hit them.

Speed for power users. Veteran billers fly through Noble*Direct on keyboard alone. Most modernization projects throw that speed away; ours is designed to keep it. The new web front end gets built keyboard-first, so your fastest people stay your fastest people.

No forced upgrade churn. SaaS vendors push changes on their schedule. Noble customers control their environment.

None of this is visible online today. The plan’s whole job is making the market see it, without breaking what makes it true: the speed, the support, the control all carry forward into the modern product.

The bigger picture

Buyers now ask AI.
You’re not in the answer.

Ask the assistants for the best DME billing software and the answer is Brightree, Bonafide, NikoHealth. Noble*Direct doesn’t appear. Not criticized. Absent.

Push on Noble directly and the assessment is blunt: deep, functionally complete software, “that’s the moat” in the AI’s own words. But essentially no public presence: no G2 or Capterra footprint, no analyst coverage, no press since 2015, and a delivery model that reads as yesterday.

“They’re not behind on capability,
they’re behind on how it’s delivered.”

The AI is right. Presence is stages 01 to 03. Delivery is stage 04. That is the whole plan.  Transcript July 2026, on file.

Where this plan ends

The plan doesn’t stop at the website.
It ends inside NobleDirect itself.

Stages 01 to 03 rebuild how Noble*Direct is seen. Stage 04 modernizes the product: a web front end on the engine you have refined for 37 years, built by the same team, on the same design system. It is the one stage a design studio cannot take on, and it is where everything before it is pointed. The full detail waits at stage 04, later in this deck.

STAGE 01
Brand

A brand system,
not just a look.

Sharpened identity, built on your equity. The Noble mark, the navy and orange, 37 years of name recognition. Refined, not replaced.

Design tokens and a component library. Color, type, spacing, buttons, cards, forms: defined once, documented, and reused by every page and screen that comes after.

On-brand by default. Anyone building for Noble, next month or in five years, starts from the system instead of guessing.

Built as: standard CSS design tokens and documented components. Readable by any designer or developer. Owned by Noble.

STAGE 02
Website

The site, rebuilt
on the system.

Fast, secure, prerendered pages with clear paths to request a demo on every one of them. Homepage, features, integrations, about, blog, contact.

Every page assembled from stage-01 components, so new pages take hours, not projects, and all of them stay on brand.

Launched carefully on your GoDaddy, with your production webhooks and services mapped and preserved. Nothing breaks on the way out the door.

Built as: plain prerendered HTML on standard foundations. No plugin runtime, nothing updating itself on a Tuesday, maintainable by any developer.

Stage 02 · Already underway

One interface direction, already built for Noble*Direct.

A working page rather than a comp, built from your real content, your real numbers and your real testimonials. Click it to browse it live.

The first working pages were built in one day, before any contract or payment. Offered as a plain data point on velocity: when the parts are standard and the content is real, assembly is fast. That pace carries through the whole plan.

The same milestone · two processes

Week three elsewhere is a wireframe.
Day one here was a working page.

Greybox wireframe · boxes standing in for contentTYPICAL PROCESS · WEEK 3
The working Noble*Direct homepage, built from Noble's real content
Working page · your content, numbers, testimonialsTHIS PROPOSAL · TODAY

A traditional agency process reaches greybox wireframes around week three. That is fair when design and build are separate teams; here they are the same two people, so the first artifact you review is the real thing: clickable, responsive, and filled with Noble’s actual content. Every review from kickoff onward happens on working pages.

STAGE 03
Search & digital landscape

How the traffic
actually grows.

How search finds you: the technical groundwork done right. Schema and structured data, clean URLs, sitemaps, metadata on every page, a full redirect map so nothing you rank for today is lost, and fast prerendered pages Google rewards. Then pages aimed at the searches DME providers actually make, so every new page is another way in.

How the AI answers improve: AI assistants can only repeat what they can read. I make the site fully machine-readable and indexed in both places the assistants pull from: Google, which feeds Gemini and AI Overviews, and Bing, which feeds ChatGPT and Copilot. More published, structured, crawlable substance means better answers about Noble*Direct.

How your footprint compounds: your social channels feed the site directly. New YouTube videos appear on the site automatically, LinkedIn posts and blog articles flow into one resource hub, and share cards make every link look right when posted. Plus the presence basics the AI flagged as missing: claimed, current profiles on G2, Capterra, and the directories buyers and AI assistants actually read.

Set up for independent success: your team writes a post and hits publish. The page, sitemap, schema, and feeds update themselves, and analytics show it climbing from your own dashboard. And independent never means alone: we stay committed, on call for whatever you need to keep growing.

Built so it’s yours: the site, the content, the analytics, and every account, all registered to Noble. Publishing is one button. No licenses to pay, no vendor in the middle, and nothing to lose if you ever switch developers.

Timeline

Four to six weeks
to a live site.

This plan · stages 01–03 brand system, site, search foundation, publishing4–6 WEEKS
Typical full content-system build wireframes → design → CMS build → content migration6–12 MONTHS
03 MO6 MO9 MO12 MO

The 4-to-6-week window is the same one in the written proposal. It is realistic for reasons this deck has already shown: standard parts instead of custom groundwork, working directions instead of wireframes, and two senior engineers on it full time. Stage 04 runs on its own clock, scoped with your engineering team.

Measured, not promised

You will watch it work.

A baseline on day one. Before anything ships, we snapshot exactly where you stand: traffic, rankings, what the AI assistants say. Every number after that is measured against it.

Your own dashboard, always on. Google Analytics and Search Console live in Noble’s accounts, wired to what matters: visits, where they came from, which pages earn them, and every demo request. Readable without us in the room.

A plain-English readout every month. What moved, what we published, what comes next. Real measured outcomes, never vanity charts.

Two honest clocks. The build has a date; the compounding has a dashboard. Search grows quarter over quarter, and you see every step instead of waiting on a big reveal.

Measured with: the same analytics tools the whole industry trusts, in your accounts. If a number is an estimate, the readout says so.

Success criteria

The numbers I expect
to be held to.

Four metrics, reviewed together at 30, 90, and 180 days from launch, each against the baseline below. Nobody can honestly guarantee Google outcomes, so I won’t; these are the checkpoints where you should expect movement, and where I expect to answer for it.

Organic traffic
85 /MO
baseline today
Keywords ranked
17
baseline today
Domain Rating
3.6
baseline today
Demo requests
—
untracked today · instrumented from day one
30days · first checkpoint
90days · second checkpoint
180days · six-month review

Every checkpoint is read from your own dashboard, in your accounts, against the day-one snapshot. If a number stalls, you hear it from me first, along with what we are changing in response.

STAGE 04
Noble*Direct itself

Then the product.
This is where a website vendor stops.

A modern web front end on the engine you already trust. The backend stays: your SQL database, your billing logic, 37 years of it. We build a new browser-based interface on top, the same product, delivered the way the market now expects. This is the direct answer to “behind on how it’s delivered.”

Nobody gets left behind. The desktop app keeps working against the same backend while the web front end rolls out beside it. Customers on older machines lose nothing; new customers see a modern product. You choose the pace.

The foundation underneath: an incremental path to current, supported .NET that works with your DevExpress version first, then stepwise upgrades. Security first, small bites, quick turnarounds, nothing breaking for the customers you have.

AI enablement for your developers: tooling set up against your codebase, workflows tuned to your stack, hands-on training. The work Michael first brought me in on.

One design language, logo to login. The new front end is built from the stage-01 system and the same industry-standard components as the site. The first impression and the thousandth screen finally match.

Built as: a standard web application on current, supported .NET, with the same component libraries as the site. Scoped and built with your engineering team in the loop the entire way, estimated line by line, started only when you say so.

Every stage, the same promise

Everything we deliver is industry standard.

The brand system, the site, the publishing tools, the product’s new front end: all built from the same parts the biggest software companies build on and maintain. No one-off component library that quietly breaks in five years and takes a full rebuild with it. You don’t maintain these parts. The industry maintains them for you.

React by Meta Angular by Google Tailwind CSS Bootstrap Material UI
Custom-built systemIndustry standards
Who maintains the componentsThe vendor. Forever. Hopefully.The industry does it for you
Who can extend itThe original vendorAnyone you hire, ever
DocumentationHowever much they wroteIndustry-wide, already exists
Time to buildMonths of groundworkWeeks, assembly on proven parts
In five yearsBreaks quietly, full rebuildStill current, still supported

Everything in your accounts from day one: code, hosting, analytics, CMS. Noble’s property from the first commit, with handoff documentation as a paid deliverable, not a favor.

Who you’re hiring

The most relevant work I can show you
is already in this deck.

Three working homepage directions, built from Noble*Direct’s own content, numbers, and testimonials, before any contract or payment. Other proposals show you work done for companies in other industries. This is work already done on Noble*Direct, and you have already clicked through it.

A site I designed, built, and launched end to end, with full SEO and prerendering, from first commit to production. It is directly the work proposed in stages 01 to 03, already done once.

NIC MAP Vision. Greenfield SaaS platforms I architected as principal engineer, work the company credited in its first profitable year. That is the question stage 04 actually asks: whether I can modernize a real product, and I have.

The practical details: Draugel Engineering is two senior engineers, so every hour on this project is a senior hour. The work is our full-time focus, which is why weeks are realistic. Charleston-based, same time zone, on-site when useful. And you always work directly with the people building it: questions answered the same day, changes in hours.

The engagement

Start where the leverage is.

Stages 01 through 03 are the written proposal in front of you: Foundation, Growth, or Authority. $175 an hour, billed on actual time, every hour itemized, with a hard not-to-exceed cap you pick up front. Site, search, and landscape live in 4 to 6 weeks.

Stage 04 is scoped separately, with your engineering team in the loop the entire way, and estimated the same way: itemized, incremental, on your schedule. It starts only when you start it. The point of doing stages 01-03 right is that stage 04 inherits the system instead of a redo.

Think of it as adding two senior engineers to staff, not hiring a firm. We are not here to ship a website and leave. The mandate is growth: rebrand, modernize, then build the revenue the modern platform unlocks, from cloud tiers of Noble*Direct to patient-facing portals to integrations partners pay for. A design firm cannot offer that, because a design firm does not build software.

1

Mutual NDA + BAA. Standard for healthcare, handled by counsel.

2

Pick an option and sign. A 30% deposit reserves the schedule, credited against hours, never charged on top.

3

Kickoff inside a week. Content, access, and the direction you pick from the three on screen.

You spent 37 years building the product.
Give it a presence, and a future, to match.

Brand, website, search, product. One system, two senior engineers, no lock-in. The first stage can be live before the next sales demo you book.

Steven Draugel·Draugel Engineering, LLC·steven@draugelengineering.com·(352) 470-6623