Agency, freelancer, builder or subscription: 4 different products, not 4 prices.

Decide what the site has to do before you decide who builds it.

Almost every bad website purchase we have seen started with the same mistake: comparing quotes before deciding what the website was for. Quotes are only comparable once the job is defined, and there are really only 3 jobs a small business site ever does.

• Be found. Somebody who has never heard of you types a problem into Google and ends up on your page. This is the only job that requires the site to be structured around what people search for rather than around how you describe yourself.
• Be shown. You send the link, or it sits under your name in an email signature, and the site has to make you look like the safe choice. Design carries almost all the weight here.
• Be a counter. Prices, opening hours, a form, a booking. The site is admin, and the win is the phone ringing less, not more.

A business that needs the first job and buys for the second ends up with something beautiful that nobody arrives at. That is the single most common outcome we are called in to fix, and it is never because the previous provider was bad at their craft. They were good at a different job.

What each one is genuinely best at, and who should pick it.

We sell one of these 4, so read the other 3 with that in mind. We have also written each of them the way we would if a friend asked, because the fastest way to lose a client is to win one who should have gone elsewhere.

Compare the 12-month total, never the build price.

Build prices are marketing. The number that decides whether a website was a good purchase is what left your account in the first 12 months, and almost nobody publishes that figure because it is made of 2 parts that are quoted separately.

Take the agency shape above at both ends. At the low end, $3,000 upfront plus $500 a month is $9,000 in year 1. At the high end, $10,000 upfront plus $2,000 a month is $34,000. Those are the same engagement described 2 different ways, and the gap between them is larger than most small business marketing budgets.

Those entry prices are honest advertising, not traps. What they rarely include is hosting, a care plan, content writing, or the work of deciding which pages should exist at all. Write down the 12-month total for every option on your shortlist, with every line item you will actually be billed for, and the comparison usually answers itself.

What our monthly fee covers →

The question that only matters on the day you leave.

A website is not 1 asset. It is 5, and they can each end up in a different name without anyone lying to you. We have taken over sites where the business owner was certain they owned everything and turned out to own nothing except the logo.

• The domain. Whoever is listed as registrant controls it. If it was bought for you as a convenience, check whose email address is on the registration.
• The code and the pages. On a proprietary platform there may be nothing exportable. Leaving means rebuilding, which is why some providers never mention export.
• The content and photography. Licensed photography usually stays with the licence holder, and copy written under a services agreement is not automatically yours.
• The hosting account. Being hosted is not the same as having the login.
• Analytics and Search Console. The asset people forget exists until they need it. If the property sits in an account belonging to a provider you part ways with, your entire performance history can go with them.

There is a 30-second version of this test. Ask any provider on your shortlist to send you admin access to the analytics property and confirm the registrant email on the domain, today, before you sign anything. A good provider does it without asking why. On this offer all 5 transfer to you from day one, and our agreement is published on the site so you can read the ownership clause before you commit to anything.

How to check who owns your website →Our agreement, published in full →

What “SEO included” means from each of them.

Every route on this page advertises SEO, and the phrase means something different in each case. None of these are lies. They are just wildly different amounts of work sold under one label.

• From a builder platform: a title field, a description field, and a sitemap that submits itself. The tool is capable. It has no opinion about which pages you should have, because it cannot know.
• From a freelancer: usually those same fields filled in properly, plus a keyword list if you asked for one. Competent, and scoped to the pages you already decided to build.
• From an agency: frequently a separate line item on a separate retainer, because the build was scoped as design. Worth checking whether the quote in front of you includes any search work at all, or whether it starts after launch at $500 to $2,000 a month.
• Here: the page list is decided by measured search demand before design starts, which is the part that cannot be added later without rebuilding the site.

You can see the difference in a title tag. SmartChoice SA sells domestic, office, end of lease, school and commercial cleaning, so each of those has its own page instead of a bullet on a services list. Technical Ceramics Australia sells to engineers who search by material, so alumina, silicon carbide, zirconia and the nitrides each get a page of their own. Neither of those structures comes out of a template.

We can be candid about the failure mode because we shipped it ourselves. This site used to run 90 URLs, most of them produced by template functions. Measured on the live rendered HTML, 2 of those pages shared 80.4% of their 7-word phrase sequences, and 49 of the 90 had never served a single impression in Google. We cut it to 36 hand-written pages and the cross-page overlap fell to 20.7%. Scale without an argument is not SEO, it is just hosting bills.

Ask every provider this, and listen to how they answer.

Portfolios are screenshots. Anybody can show you a homepage that looks expensive, and a homepage that looks expensive tells you nothing about whether it was ever found. This question separates people who build websites from people whose websites work, because only the second group has an answer ready.

Listen for 3 things: a URL you can open right now, a specific phrase rather than a category, and a named client rather than “a client in your industry”. The answers that should worry you are the ones that change the subject. SEO takes time. We do not share client data. Here is a screenshot with the domain cropped out.

Ours, so you can hold us to the same standard. Underpinning Sydney reached the top 3 for underpinning Sydney. Adelaide's Bathroom Network began ranking inside 8 weeks. Lucky Duck Mowing received its first quote request 28 minutes after the site went live, from Tony in Dicky Beach, about a rear duplex lawn under 100sqm. Shakin Entertainment had a Square-built site with a Domain Rating of 0, one ranking keyword (its own business name) and no organic traffic at all, and took its first booking enquiry on the Monday after a Friday launch. Adelaide Hens Nights had its first enquiry 2 days after launch.

What we will not tell you is where your site will rank or when, because nobody can, and any provider who does is describing a hope as a deliverable. There are 12 live client sites listed on this site that you can open and check yourself, which is a slower argument than a promise and a much harder one to fake.

The case studies, with the numbers attached →

When we are the wrong answer.

A page comparing 4 routes is worthless if it concludes that ours wins every time. It does not. Here is where you should close this tab and go somewhere else.

• You want to talk it through out loud. This offer runs entirely by email and through a client portal, and that is exactly why we can give the build away. If speaking to somebody is a precondition for you, an agency or a local freelancer is a better experience and we would rather say so now.
• You need a brand built from nothing. Logo, identity system, tone of voice, the lot. That is a design engagement, and it should be bought from somebody who does it properly.
• You are running a real online store. Hundreds of products, stock sync, shipping rules and returns. Go to an agency with e-commerce experience.
• You want no monthly commitment at all. Perfectly reasonable. Pay a freelancer once, own the outcome outright, and accept that maintenance and search work become your problem.
• The business is untested. If you are not sure the offer sells yet, put a builder platform in front of it for a year and find that out before you commit to anything monthly.
• You need it live this week. Build time is 5 working days from the point we have your intake details, and we only take 4 builds a month, with 3 of those slots open right now.

If none of those describe you, and the site has to bring in work that you are not currently getting, then this is the route we built for exactly that. No leads from SEO in your first 90 days and you stop paying until one arrives.