Website Costs and Pricings
Everybody wants 3 things: Highest Quality > Best Service > Lowest Investment! Since that's an impossible combo, you will need to decide which off the 3 things you would like to sacrifice: Highest Quality? Best Service? or the Lowest Investment? If you are willing to sacrifice the highest quality or the best service, you have come to the wrong place. However, if you can sacrifice "Lowest Investment" for "Reasonable Investment", we can certainly help. Please remember websites are NOT expenses, they are investments. If done right, websites will return the investment you put in it. Now, while our prices are competitive, you will need to contact us for a quote but please make a tentative budget for your website first also, please read below to see how the website costs are calculated.
Hourly Rate or Fixed/Flat Rate?
We have hourly rates that we work off of, but for new clients we always start with a base price. Hourly rates are great, but fixed price may give you a bit more peace of mind. So we give you a base price for a static website, e-commerce or CMS driven dynamic site. We start by estimating how many hours it would take us to build a basic HTML/CSS site multiplied by a reasonable hourly rate; many years of experience makes us estimate costs more accurately.
We do not want to charge too much and be seen as over-priced but we also do not want to charge so little that we are not covering our expenses (Forget pay rent, family to feed!). Now, a price that is fair for us might be well over budget or way under-priced for you. So we would like to know what your budget is for your project and see what we can do within that budget, if anything at all or if we can do much more than you expected.
When Do You Pay Additional Amounts at Hourly Rate?
Flat or fixed-rate billing is very clear. In Web design it is usually a rate based on a per-page basis. We offer website packages, where we will build a static website with a pre-determined number of pages for a specific price, dynamic website such as e-commerce or CMS depends on minimum features common for all such software. Most customers like flat-rate billing because they believe there won't be any hidden fees - they will get exactly what they asked for, no more and no less and normally without any hassle.
But, some clients can be more difficult than others. This could result in us spending more time on the site than we can afford. In this kind of cases we will request all additional changes to requirements (that is more than feasible changes allowed by contract) be paid at hourly rate. Here are three examples:
The site looks awesome. I am very happy with all your work and I have got numerous compliments already and am sharing your company’s name.
Adam Meyer
Parrish & Heimbecker, Limited.
I can do everything I need to do to run Hockey Training site. Thank you for all your hard work. My members are liking the site too. Thank you for taking care of all issues brought up to you.
Daniel Tkaczuk
iHockey Trainer LTD.
We love the site you have done for us specially the interactive flash Keywatcher Configurator. Also, the FTP login area looks great. We have all the tools we need there.
Ryan D'Sylva
Morse Canada Inc.
Too much content: You might have a flat-rate based on a set number of pages. But what if you want 3Gig of data crammed into 5 pages? Sure, that'd be bad for you, but if we cannot convince you of that, we could be stuck building a 5 page site that should really be 500 pages (or more). Even if we define in our contract how many images we will create for your site and how much content is allowed on the site, in a bad situation we can end up with more content than we have allocated resources for. Therefore, we will request all additional work be paid at hourly rate.
Too many change requests: This is a very common issue, especially with inexpensive design jobs. You may want to have a lot of say in the design process. Perhaps you may even be demanding daily conferences to discuss progress. If we are building with a flat-rate, all of these conferences become essentially unpaid. We allow you limited changes you can ask for in your designs; if you are going overboard with changing your mind frequently about what the design should look like we will have a problem as we cannot put in 100 hours in a project that is supposed to take 15-20 hours. Therefore, we will request all additional work be paid at hourly rate.
Change in requirements: If you add requirements that is not defined in the scope of the project contract, we will require that you pay for additional work at hourly rate. This will be brought up to you ahead of commencing such additional work so there is no surprises later; and will be performed as agreed at this point.
Obviously, we allow limited change requests from clients as we understand some change requests could be because of unforeseen reasons but no professional companies will be able to stay in business allowing unlimited changes or additions to fixed rate projects.
Why Should Projects Using Free Open Source Cost Money?
A common misconception is use of free open source means free or at next to nothing costing website. If we are to use a free open source software for your project, we do not bill you for the software. However, you cannot be expecting our time we put in your project to be free of charge. We may very well be adding a lot of custom codes on top of a free open source only to reduce development cost for your website. Not to mention, we ALWAYS custom design your website for you instead of using over-used templates; both custom designs and integration in a software regardless if it is free or paid take time and you are only billed for that time.
How Do We Determine Our Hourly Costs?
Our hourly rates are very reasonable for a company that provides the highest quality of services, however, we do not just come up with a random number looking at your budget or business size. We take into consideration all expenses incurred in the business divided by billable yearly hours; after that we aim for 10% profit:
- Hardware - usually amortized over several years
- Software - licensing fees to use various tools necessary for web and software development
- Office furniture - again, amortized over several years
- Office supplies
- Office equipment beyond the computer - amortized
- Utilities
- Hosting and Internet fees
- Advertising, marketing, and promotion costs (our cost-effective marketing strategies such as SEO lower such expenses)
- Taxes
- Licenses
- Insurance
- Average salary paid to designer or programmer for specific trechnology requested
- Travel expenses
- Time off - either vacation or sick leave
- Management and administration
Bottomline
We do business with you together. Over the years, we have built this company with utmost honesty and integrity, therefore, we honestly try to keep your website costs to the minimum. But at the end of the day, the costs need to be something that we can both live with and without sacrificing quality of service as that could hurt the reputation of both our companies. More importantly, when we work together we expect mutual respect and professionalism. Please learn more about our company and please contact us to get your free estimates today.
