We are a bit different than other services in that we do NOT have any upfront fee for website design or development. After discussing what you want on your website, how content will be provided, what kind of graphics will be needed to meet your vision, and how much you desire to add content yourself or let us add content as well as monthly updates/changes, we will calculate the number of hours we anticipate working on the website for the next two years, multiply by our current hourly rate, and divide by 24 months (2 years) to come up with how much we should charge monthly for the next two years to earn our rate. Then we will round up or round down to our nearest billing bracket to determine your monthly fee. We have never required a contract. If we can’t keep you satisfied as a client and you wish to go elsewhere, we may be disappointed but we won’t stand in the way by enforcing some ‘legal’ contract. That is not who we are.
As we approach the 2nd year of work on your site, we will re-evaluate the time we are spending each month and, if warranted, we will reduce our fee as well as ask for a fee increase. Approximately 55% of our current clients have received a fee decrease beginning the 3rd year. We have only requested a fee increase four times since 2002 which all four clients agreed and they are all still clients, two for more than 10 years. The reason we may drop our fees is due to decreased hours being spend on the website and we do not want to be paid more than we feel the quality of the work is worth which is our current hourly rate.
Our monthly fee covers:
- Website Design
- Website Development
- Website Hosting
- Ongoing management of the website including content changes
- Annual Renewal of Primary Domain Name (Must be in our master GoDaddy account so we have access)
Our monthly fee does not cover the annual SSL certificate renewal which secures the website. This is currently a $35/yr charge. Google recommended this in 2014 and all major browser now show non-SSL secured websites as ‘insecure websites’.
We settled on this business plan in 2005 and it has worked well for our clients as well as for us. Clients get a website without a substantial upfront cost and we get a client for at least 2 years. In 21+ years and 200+ clients, we’ve only had 2 clients to terminate our services in less than the original 2 years. Word of mouth has been the primary reason for our growth which is enhanced by our clients knowing we will be fair in our billing practices. They tell their business associates, friends and family which allows us to have another potential client.
Our current monthly brackets $60, $80, $100, $125, $150, $175 and $200. On a few rare occasions it might be more than $200 but this has only happened twice since 2002 and were larger websites with greater demand on our time. The clients were satisfied with our fee!