A website subscription versus a one-off build.

The usual deal — minus the risk of losing your money

In classic web development you pay first and see the result last. If you do not like the site, the argument is already lost: the money is with the contractor and every fix is “extra”. We invert the order. The brief and the build are free, and you look at a finished home page before you decide anything and before you pay anything. The first month of service is paid upfront at launch — and it is fully refundable: if the site is not right for you, you get the money back. After that the site runs month to month and you can stop whenever you want.

• Design is free. You pay only after you have approved what you see.
• The first month is refundable. Not a vague “quality promise” — an actual refund.
• No upfront development fee. Launch costs nothing; after that it is a subscription from $60 a month.

No spec document — you start the same day

The slowest part of a normal project is not the code — it is the approvals. The client is asked to describe in words a website they have never seen, that description becomes a twenty-page specification, and then both sides spend a month working out what it actually meant. We removed that stage. A short brief is enough — what you do, what you sell, who buys it. Then we build the site the way we think it should be built, based on similar projects, and you look at the result and tell us what to change. Discussing a finished page is far faster and far more honest than discussing a paragraph in a document.

• One short brief instead of weeks of arguing about wording.
• 7–30 days to launch — a landing page in about a week, a large catalogue in up to a month.
• Changes are not a post-delivery event. Edits are part of the service, so there is no need to predict every detail in advance.

No heavy contract, because there is nothing to protect against

A thick contract with annexes, acceptance certificates, and penalties exists for one reason: the client paid a large sum upfront and now needs to protect it legally. Remove the upfront payment and half of that contract becomes pointless. There is no sum here for you to lose: development is free, the first month is refundable, and after that you pay one month at a time and can stop whenever you like. There is nothing to litigate about “milestone deadlines” either — if the work stalls, you simply do not pay for the next month. That disciplines a contractor better than any penalty clause.

We earn while the site is useful to you — and that changes everything

Look at the incentives and the difference is obvious. A studio paid once earns at delivery: the faster the project closes and the less goes into it after sign-off, the higher the margin. What happens to the site afterwards does not affect that studio’s revenue at all. Our revenue is a subscription that continues only while you renew it. So exactly one thing is in our interest: that the site brings you enquiries and you never want to leave. We cannot ship and forget — the client would be gone in two months and the free launch would be money we spent for nothing.

• One-off payment: the contractor wins by never touching the site again.
• Subscription: the contractor wins by keeping the site a working tool year after year.
• What that means for you: with a subscription the incentives align, and nobody needs to upsell you fixes.

A maintained site grows; an unmaintained one quietly rots

The usual life of a “turnkey” website: neat for a month, and six months later the catalogue lists products that no longer exist, the news section ends two years ago, the layout breaks on phones, and someone has pasted a description straight out of Word — complete with its own font, colour, and stray margins. A site does not break all at once; it degrades in small steps, and you notice when the enquiries have already stopped. Under a maintenance plan every change goes through the people who built the site: layouts stay intact, the style stays consistent, speed does not slip, and broken links or dead forms get found before your customers find them.

• Edits are made by the people who built the site — not by whoever happens to be free.
• Monitoring and backups are included: we see the outage, not you via an angry customer call.
• One consistent style. A year in, the site still looks designed rather than assembled.

Search engines prefer a living site to a frozen one

Crawlers come back to a site as often as the site changes. One that has not been updated in a year gets crawled rarely: new pages take a long time to appear in the index, and old ones slowly lose ground to competitors who keep publishing, adding products, and rewriting descriptions. Working on a site regularly is not a trick played on an algorithm — it is ordinary useful work: new pages for real search queries, accurate prices and stock, better titles and descriptions, real photos instead of stock images. We do it continuously, because the subscription lasts exactly as long as the site delivers.

• More crawling means faster indexing. A new page shows up in search within days, not months.
• Freshness matters to buyers too. An outdated price or a discontinued product means a bounce — and bounces get counted.
• Content compounds. Every new page adds queries you can be found for.

New technology reaches your site on its own

A site built once stays at the level of the year it was delivered. Meanwhile a lot changes: browsers gain new image formats, search engines start scoring speed and layout stability, new payment and messaging options appear, and old libraries stop getting updates and turn into a security hole. To keep up, the owner of a one-off site has to first learn about the problem, then find someone to fix it, then pay for the work. For us it is part of the service: we test solutions on our own projects and roll the good ones out to the rest — with no separate invoice and no effort from you.

• Speed and the mobile version — the things that move both rankings and conversion.
• Security. Updates and certificates are our job, not a reminder in your calendar.
• New payment and messaging options get connected as they appear, not “eventually”.

It is not only the text that gets updated — the design does too

Design ages the least visibly of all. A five-year-old site rarely looks broken — it just looks five years old, and a visitor forms an opinion about the company before reading the first sentence. With one-off development a redesign is a separate large project for separate money, so it gets postponed for years. Here changes arrive gradually: typography and spacing get refreshed, cards get reshot, dated blocks get rebuilt. The site does not have to “move house” every five years, losing rankings and confusing returning customers — it simply stays current.

We look after your map listings, not just your website

A share of your customers never opens the website — they look at the map listing: address, opening hours, photos, reviews. That is where they decide whether to come to you or to the business next door. A listing with last year’s phone number, no photos, and a vague description costs you enquiries exactly like a bad website does. So we keep listings current alongside the site: details, photos, categories, links, and consistency with what the site says.

• Google Business Profile — address, phone, hours, and categories kept current.
• Photos and description — the same ones as on the site, not random shots from a decade ago.
• Consistency. The listing and the site say the same thing — which matters to people and to search engines alike.

Want to own the site outright? Buy it — but not on day one

Buying the site out is possible: all access transfers to you, and the domain can be registered in your name from the very beginning anyway. But it makes sense to do it after a month or two rather than on day one. A freshly launched site is still a hypothesis: nobody knows yet which pages will pull traffic, where visitors drop off, which order-form fields are redundant, what is missing from a product page. A few weeks of real traffic answers all of that with numbers, and we fix it as we go — as work already covered by the subscription. What is worth buying is a site that has been polished and tested in the field, not one that has never met a real customer.

• A month or two of service is the window in which the site is tuned to how visitors actually behave.
• On buyout all access transfers to you, and the domain can be in your name from the start regardless.
• No lock-in. If you decide to leave, you leave with a working site rather than a grudge about a prepayment.