For years, pricing is where I left the most money on the table. I priced websites by the hour, raced other shops to the bottom, and ignored the fact that the tool I built on was quietly eating my margin every single month. Here is how I think about it now.
Stop pricing by the hour
Hourly pricing punishes you for getting faster, and once I started building with AI that got obvious fast. The better I got, the less I earned for the same result. So I price the outcome now. A site that looks designed, gets found, and brings the client leads. That is worth the same whether it took me three weeks or three days.
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Three packages that sell
My local clients never wanted a menu of forty options. They want to pick a tier and move on. Three works best for me.
- Starter - a clean multi-page site, core local SEO, and a contact form. For the business that just needs to look legit and get found.
- Growth - everything in Starter plus service-area pages, a blog, schema, and conversion tracking. For the business actively chasing leads.
- Authority - everything in Growth plus ongoing content, analytics reporting, and a care plan. For the business that wants to own its market.
The margin math nobody tells you
Here is the part that changed my business. Once I owned my platform instead of renting it per site, my cost to deliver each additional client site dropped close to zero. The price I charge is almost all margin now.
Per-site platform fees compound forever. A buy-once, self-hosted platform turns that recurring cost into a one-time line, so the price you charge each client stays in your pocket.
See the full breakdown in the pricing section, or compare the per-site model directly in the Webflow and Duda comparisons.
Turn websites into recurring revenue
A one-time build is a transaction. A care plan is a business. Bundle hosting, analytics reporting, content updates, and SEO maintenance into a monthly retainer. Because your hosting cost is flat and near-zero, the hosting line on that retainer is margin, not a pass-through.
Own the platform, and you own the margin it bills.
- Bill a monthly care plan that covers hosting, backups, edits, and uptime.
- Add a reporting retainer using first-party analytics the client can actually read.
- Upsell content and local SEO once the site is live and ranking.
Price the value, keep the margin
Price the outcome, sell three clean tiers, and stop renting the platform that delivers them. That is how a web-design service turns into a real, recurring business. When you are ready, try the platform live.
