Ask most web agencies what a website costs and you won’t get a number. You’ll get an invitation to a call.
That’s not because pricing is too complicated to put on a page. It’s because the call is the sales tool, not the price. Once you’re on it, the conversation isn’t “here’s what this costs” — it’s “let’s talk about your goals,” which is agency-speak for finding out what you’re willing to spend before a number gets said out loud. I don’t do that. Here’s the list, in full, right now:
- Starter Growth Site — $3,750
- Pro Growth Site — $5,950
- Authority Site — $8,750
That’s the whole menu. No “starting at.” No asterisk pointing to a footnote about scope. If you want to know what a site costs before you talk to me, this page answers that question completely.
What it doesn’t answer — and what most pricing pages don’t even attempt — is why those are the numbers. Not “what’s included,” which is a features list dressed up to look like a justification. What’s actually different, underneath, that makes one tier cost less and another cost more. That’s worth explaining properly, because the answer isn’t “more design” at any step. It’s a different answer to one question: who maintains this site, and what happens to it under load.
Starter — $3,750: no CMS, and that’s the point
The Starter tier is a static site — hand-built HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, version-controlled in a Bitbucket repo, published to Netlify. There’s no WordPress. No database. No CMS at all.
I want to be clear that this isn’t a corner I’m cutting to hit a lower price. It’s the reason the price is lower, and it’s also the reason the site is, in some ways, the highest-value thing on this list.
A CMS exists to solve one problem: letting someone without technical skills edit their own content. That’s a real problem, and it’s worth solving — for the right owner. But it’s also infrastructure, and infrastructure has a cost whether you use it or not. Every WordPress site is carrying a database, a plugin stack, a login screen that’s a permanent target, and a core codebase that needs patching on a schedule whether you ever touch it or not. If you’re never going to log in and edit a page yourself, none of that is buying you anything. You’re paying — in dollars, in load time, in attack surface — for a capability you don’t use.
Take the CMS out, and what’s left is about as fast and as secure as a website can be. No database query has to run before your page shows up. No plugin has to load before the browser can render. No login page exists for anyone to try to break into, because there isn’t one. On a phone, on one bar of signal, in a parking lot — that’s the difference between a site that loads and a site that’s still spinning by the time your prospect gives up and calls the next guy on the list.
The tradeoff isn’t capability. It’s who touches the content after launch. On this tier, that’s me. Need a service updated, a new page added, a phone number changed — that’s a quick edit through the repo, and it’s usually turned around fast, because there’s no CMS overhead on my end either. If you’re comfortable with that arrangement — and a lot of owners are, because they didn’t want to be their own webmaster in the first place — this is the highest-value option on the list, dollar for dollar. You’re not getting less site. You’re getting a site with less sitting between your visitor and your phone number.
Pro — $5,950: WordPress, built lean
The jump to Pro is a WordPress site — custom-built theme, hosted on Cloudways, running a minimal plugin footprint. This is the tier where a CMS actually earns its keep, because now you’re the one editing it.
Here’s the part that doesn’t get said enough: most WordPress contractor sites are slow, and WordPress isn’t the reason. The reason is what gets stacked on top of it. A page builder plugin for a designer who doesn’t hand-code. Five more plugins for forms, popups, SEO, caching, and whatever the last consultant recommended. A theme that ships with features nobody uses but every visitor’s browser has to load anyway. None of that is WordPress being slow. That’s an agency’s build process being slow, running on top of WordPress.
Build the theme by hand instead of assembling it from a page builder, and keep the plugin count to what the site actually needs — a handful, not fifteen — and you get a CMS site that loads like it doesn’t have one. You get the editing capability the Starter tier doesn’t have, without inheriting the bloat that capability usually drags in with it. That’s the actual product at this tier: not “a WordPress site,” but a WordPress site built the way WordPress sites are supposed to be built and almost never are.
Authority — $8,750: the foundation, plus a page built to convert
Authority starts from the same place as Pro — same WordPress-on-Cloudways foundation, same lean-build philosophy — and adds a dedicated landing page, conversion-rate optimization, and additional speed work on top of it.
This tier isn’t for every owner, and I’d rather say that plainly than pad the pitch. It’s for someone running paid traffic, or juggling more than one service-area campaign, who needs a page built to do one specific job: take a visitor arriving from a specific source and convert them, not just represent the business in general. That’s a different design problem than a homepage. A homepage has to serve everyone who might land on it. A landing page has to serve one kind of visitor extremely well, and everything on it — the headline, the form placement, the number of steps between arrival and a submitted lead — gets built and tested around that one job.
If you’re not running paid traffic yet, you probably don’t need this tier. If you are, and your current site is sending that traffic to a generic homepage, that mismatch is quietly costing you leads you already paid to generate.
The real principle, stated plainly
Here’s the thing worth taking away from all three: the price difference across these tiers isn’t a “more design” scale. It’s not that Authority is a fancier version of Starter. Each tier answers the same underlying question — who maintains this, and what does it cost to support that — differently, and the biggest jump on the whole list isn’t the one you’d expect.
The gap between Starter and Pro is an architectural decision. Static versus CMS. No maintenance surface versus a maintenance surface you can operate yourself. That’s a bigger structural change than anything that happens between Pro and Authority, where the foundation stays identical and what’s added is a landing page and some optimization work on top of it. If you’re choosing between tiers, that’s the real fork in the road — not “how much site do I want,” but “do I want to be the one editing it.”
Why agencies don’t publish this
I don’t think most agencies withhold pricing because the answer is complicated. I think they withhold it because the discovery call does a job a published number can’t do: it lets them find out what you’re willing to spend before they say a figure out loud, and it gives them a chance to build value — or manufacture urgency — before the price lands. That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s just how a sales process built around a call instead of a page tends to work, whether anyone running it thinks of it that way or not.
Publishing the number removes that step. There’s no calibrating the pitch to the prospect, because the prospect already has the number before the conversation starts.
What publishing the number costs me
I’ll be straight about the downside, because a page like this is worthless if it only tells you the upside.
Some people rule themselves out before we ever talk, because the number’s higher than what they had budgeted, and a sales call might have talked them into a smaller scope or a payment plan that gets them in the door anyway. I don’t get that chance. Some people see the number and try to negotiate it down, the way you might on a car, which isn’t really how a fixed-scope build works, and that’s an occasionally awkward conversation.
I do it anyway, because the alternative is worse. A site that quietly slides scope to hit a budget number produces a worse result for the client and a worse case study for me. I’d rather lose the lead that couldn’t clear the number than win it and build something under-scoped to make the math work.
What to do with this
If you’re comparing me against an agency that wants a discovery call before naming a price, here’s the one question worth asking them before you get on it: what’s the site built on, and who maintains it after launch?
Not “what’s included” — every agency has a features list, and features lists all sound similar. Ask about the foundation instead. Static or CMS. Custom-built theme or page-builder assembly. A handful of plugins or fifteen. That question tends to surface more than a proposal does, and it’ll tell you more about what you’re actually buying than a call designed to find your budget ever will.
