For most of the last year we sold websites and small applications the way almost everyone does: a fixed scope, a fixed price, half up front, half on delivery. It worked. We are stopping anyway.
As of this month, websites and small apps are sold as monthly plans that include the build, the hosting, the security, and the ongoing changes for one price. No setup fee, no deposit, nothing due before we start. Here is the reasoning, including the parts that are uncomfortable.
The one-time model has a quiet failure built into it
A one-time build ends at launch. That is the moment the relationship is supposed to be at its most valuable, and instead it goes quiet. The site sits there. Nobody patches it. The hosting bill goes to somebody who is not sure what it is for. Six months later the contact form has been broken for weeks and nobody noticed.
We saw this pattern enough times to stop pretending it was the client’s problem. If a site we built is broken and nobody is watching it, that is a design flaw in how we sold it, not a customer failure.
The data backs this up. Agencies working on retainer run roughly 18 percent annual client churn with an average relationship around 56 months. Project-based shops run about 42 percent churn and 24 months. Continuous relationships last more than twice as long, and the reason is not loyalty. It is that somebody is still paying attention.
The uncomfortable part: this is better for us too
Plenty of agencies will tell you a subscription is purely in your interest. It is not. Recurring revenue is easier to plan around than a lumpy pipeline of one-off projects, and that stability is genuinely valuable to us. You should assume any business proposing a subscription benefits from it.
The honest question is not whether we benefit. It is whether the incentives point the same direction. Under a one-time contract, every hour after launch costs us money, so the incentive is to finish and leave. Under a monthly plan, a site that breaks costs us support time, so the incentive is to build it properly the first time and keep it healthy. That alignment is the actual argument.
Why there is a 12-month initial term
This is the part most subscription pitches skip past, so here it is directly.
When you pay nothing up front, we carry the entire cost of building your site. A build represents real hours that are already spent by the time you make your second payment. If a client leaves at month three, we have effectively donated a website.
The 12-month term is what makes zero upfront cost possible. It is not a trick to trap you, and we do not think it should be dressed up as anything other than what it is: the mechanism that lets us take the risk instead of asking you to.
After that first year it converts to month to month with 30 days’ notice. A subscription with no exit at all is a red flag, and buyers are right to treat it as one.
What we will not do on a plan
Monthly plans work because the build fits inside a predictable budget. A five page marketing site does. A multi-tenant SaaS product with billing, or a system handling medical records under HIPAA, does not. Those take hundreds of hours, and no monthly price we could charge without embarrassment would recover that inside a reasonable term.
So we kept a second lane. Larger custom projects are still scoped, quoted as fixed bids within 48 hours, and paid against milestones. If your project belongs there, we will tell you rather than squeeze it into a plan and quietly resent it later.
The failure mode we are actively guarding against is absorbing a 120 hour build into a plan priced for a 60 hour one. That client would be unprofitable for three years, and unprofitable clients get worse service. Naming the boundary out loud is how we avoid it.
What you own
Your domain, your content, your images, and your customer data are yours from day one, on every plan, with no conditions attached to payment. While you are subscribed we own and maintain the code that runs the site, which is exactly what makes the zero upfront cost work.
If you want to leave and take the code with you, you can buy it outright at any time for three months of your plan rate. If you just want to leave, you keep everything that was yours and we hand it over in standard formats.
If you are evaluating any subscription agency
Ask these four questions. Ours are answered on the plans page, and if another agency will not answer them plainly, that is information too.
- What exactly happens to my site, my domain, and my data if I cancel?
- Is there a minimum term, and does it convert to month to month afterward?
- What counts as an included change, and what triggers a separate invoice?
- Who owns the code, and can I buy it? For how much?
A good answer to all four is worth more than a low monthly number with vague terms behind it.