How we price our work (and why not by the hour)

We price almost everything as a fixed cost agreed up front, not by the hour. A typical small business website is a fixed project price; ongoing work like hosting, care, and content is a fixed monthly amount. I want to explain why, because how a studio charges tells you a lot about whether its interests line up with yours, and because the honest version of this conversation is one most agencies avoid having.

This is a behind-the-scenes piece rather than a price list (prices depend on what you actually need), but the thinking behind the model is worth being open about.

Why we moved away from the hourly rate

Billing by the hour sounds fair, but it quietly pits us against you. The faster and more efficiently we work, the less we earn, which is a strange incentive to build into a relationship. It also punishes experience: the studio that has solved your problem fifty times before does it quickly, and under hourly billing gets paid less for knowing more. And it leaves you with an open-ended bill you cannot predict. As better tools, including AI, have made parts of the work faster, hourly billing has made even less sense. We would rather be paid for the result than for the time.

Fixed prices, agreed before we start

So we quote a fixed price for a defined piece of work. You know the number before you commit, and it does not move unless the scope genuinely changes (and if it does, we talk about it before any work happens, not after). This puts the risk of our efficiency on us, where it belongs, and gives you a cost you can actually plan around. It also keeps us honest about scope: because we have agreed what the project is, there is no incentive to pad it. For ongoing work, a fixed monthly amount does the same job: predictable for you, stable for us.

The part most people are not told

Here is the uncomfortable truth that the cheap end of the market relies on you not knowing: a website is not a one-off purchase. Over three years, the cost of hosting, maintenance, security, updates, and the occasional fix often adds up to as much as the original build, sometimes more. A site is a thing you run, like a vehicle, not a thing you buy once and forget. Anyone quoting you a suspiciously cheap build is either planning to make it back later, or cutting the very things (maintenance, security) that you will miss most when they are gone. We would rather tell you the real total up front.

Who this suits, and who it does not

I will be honest that this model is not for everyone. If you are looking for the absolute cheapest possible site and do not mind what happens to it afterwards, we are not the right studio, and that is fine. Our pricing is built for businesses that want something done properly, want to know the cost in advance, and understand that a website is an asset worth maintaining. If that is you, predictable fixed pricing is a relief rather than a cost.

The bottom line

We price for predictability and for an honest alignment of interests: you know what you are paying, and we are paid for doing the job well rather than slowly. This piece is part of how we run the studio. If you want a real number for a real project, the honest way to get one is to tell us what you need, and we will quote it properly.