A discovery-call gate
You do not have to sit through a call before you are allowed to know what it costs. The prices are on the page and the hours are on this one.
Where the price comes from
One rate. Honest hours. The multiplication done in front of you.
There are no packages here and nothing is "starting at". I charge $40 an hour, I count the hours the job actually takes, and the number that falls out is your fixed price, in writing, before any work starts, and it does not move afterwards. This page shows you every line.
The rate
$40 an hour, and why that number is what it is
A rate is not a value judgement, it is a cost structure. Mine is low because my costs are low, not because I do less of the job.
What I don't have to charge you for
- No office. I work from a desk in Brainerd. Nobody is paying Minneapolis commercial rent out of your quote.
- No project manager, no account handler. In an agency your job is touched by four or five people and you speak to the one who does not build it. Here it is one person doing both.
- No salesperson and no commission. You found the price on a page instead of sitting through a call designed to find out what you can afford.
- No subcontractors. Nothing gets marked up on its way through somebody else.
- No page builder tax. I write the code by hand, so a five-page site is about twenty hours. Assembling the same thing out of a theme and a dozen plugins routinely takes three times that and then needs maintaining forever.
Where that puts me against everyone else
Typical project prices for a small-business website. Figures gathered in August 2026 from published rates, marketplace averages and quotes I have seen in Minnesota. Treat them as the shape of the market, not a survey.
A Fiverr orderMost orders land in this range
$50-$500
An Upwork small-business projectRough average
~$800
The Minnesota budget floorCheapest local quotes: landing page / brochure site
$200 / $500
SwansonXLanding page, one page, five pages
$250-$800
US freelance, small-business projectThe wide national band
$1,500-$8,000
The Minnesota professional tierEstablished local freelancers and small studios
$2,500-$4,500
A Twin Cities agencySmall-business site, full process
$6,000-$9,000
I sit above the marketplaces and below the professional tier. That is a deliberate position and an honest one: I am doing the professional tier's work with a fraction of its overhead, and I have been doing it for less time than they have.
The arithmetic
Every hour in a quote, listed
These are the actual line items I use. The whole point of showing them is that you can argue with one. If a line does not apply to your job, it comes out and the price comes down.
| What I do | Hours |
|---|---|
| Discovery, and a look at what you already have | 1.5 |
| Design: type, color, layout, the visual system | 3 |
| Building the page | 1.5 |
| Contact form wired straight to your inbox | 0.75 |
| SEO setup, sitemap and structured data | 1 |
| Launch, domain, handover and walkthrough | 1.5 |
| 9.25 hours × $40$370, rounded to the nearest $50 | $350 |
| What I do | Hours |
|---|---|
| Everything in the one-page build above | 9.25 |
| Four more pages at 2.5 hours each | 10 |
| Google Business Profile set upThe thing that decides whether you appear in the map results | 1 |
| 20.25 hours × $40$810, rounded to the nearest $50 | $800 |
| What I do | Hours |
|---|---|
| Discovery, and the offer you are running | 1 |
| Design of the single page | 2.5 |
| Build | 1.25 |
| Form or booking wired straight to you | 0.75 |
| Tracking ready for Meta or Google Ads | 0.25 |
| Launch and handover | 0.5 |
| 6.25 hours × $40A year of hosting included, or the source zipped to you | $250 |
| If you need it | Hours |
|---|---|
| Editing and tightening copy you sendPer page | 0.5 |
| Writing the copy from scratchPer page | 1.25 |
| Cropping and optimizing your photos | 0.5 |
| Sourcing and licensing stock photography | 1 |
| Designing a simple wordmark logo | 2.5 |
| Google Business Profile setup | 1 |
| Booking or quote-request system | 6 |
| Selling products onlinePayments, stock and tax are a different kind of build | Quoted properly |
Quotes round to the nearest $50, which on a one-page site rounds $370 down to $350. The same table drives the estimator on the main site, so you can tick your own options and watch it add up before you talk to me.
The monthly part
What $79 a month actually buys
It is a subscription and I am not going to dress it up as anything else. What makes it defensible is that you can check the arithmetic.
3 hrsof my time each month
×
$40my hourly rate
=
$120before hosting is counted
The plan is $79. The included edit time alone is worth half again more than the fee, which makes the hosting, the SSL, the domain renewals, the backups, the security updates and the uptime monitoring effectively free. Anything past three hours is billed at the same $40, always agreed first.
You are already paying somebody for hosting every month. The only real question is what comes with it, and whether the person doing your edits is you.
The parts of it I would want told to me
- It is optional, at the start and afterwards. Say so up front and I will price the build alone. You get the source code and owe nothing monthly. Hosting and updates become your job instead.
- Cancel any time, no exit fee. You keep the code, the content and the domain.
- But the site does go offline. The plan is what pays for the hosting. Any developer can put it back up from the files you hold (it is an afternoon, not a rebuild), but I would rather you knew that now than found out later.
- Unused hours do not roll over. Most months nobody needs three hours, and that is what pays for the months somebody needs five.
Why I am not cheaper
There is a floor under this and it is not shyness about the number.
Below roughly $250 a job stops being a design and becomes a template with your name typed into it. I could sell that. What I could not do is the discovery conversation, the writing, the accessibility and speed work, or the part where I am still answering the phone in March. Those are the parts that decide whether the site earns anything.
If the cheapest possible number is the whole decision, Fiverr will beat me and I am not going to match it. That is a real option and the comparison page says when to take it.
Why I am not more expensive
The agency's extra five thousand dollars is buying real things. Just not always things a five-page site needs.
It buys strategy work, a team with redundancy in it, photography, campaign management, procurement processes, and somebody whose whole job is that your project does not get forgotten. For a business with real revenue riding on the site, that is money well spent.
For a new business that needs to look credible when somebody googles it before calling, it is mostly process you are paying for. That gap is the entire reason I have a business.
Never on the bill
Things that will not appear on your invoice
"Starting at"
The fixed price is agreed in writing before any work begins and does not move afterwards. If the job runs long, that is my problem.
Change fees inside the scope
Revisions during the build are the build. You tell me what to change in plain English and I change it. Adding something new to the brief gets re-quoted first, never invoiced after.
A rush fee
Most single-page sites go live within a week anyway. If your deadline is not doable I will say so rather than charge extra to try.
Markup on hosting or your domain
On the care plan they are included at no margin worth mentioning. Off it, you pay the registrar and the host directly. I do not sit in the middle of that.
A charge for the quote
The quote, the advice and the honest answer about whether you should hire me at all are free, and stay free if the answer is no.
Questions
Pricing questions, answered
Is $350 really the whole price for a website?
It is the whole build cost for a one-page site where you supply the words and photos, 9.25 hours at $40. More pages, copywriting, photo sourcing or a booking system add hours, and the itemized estimate shows you which ones before anything starts. What never happens is a number moving after you have agreed it.
Why is your hourly rate lower than other developers?
Because my costs are lower, not because the hours are shorter. No office, no project manager, no account handler, no salesperson, no subcontractors, and I live in Brainerd rather than Minneapolis. I also write the code by hand, so a five-page site is about twenty hours rather than the sixty a plugin-heavy build can take. If I ever raise the rate I will raise it on the page, not on your invoice.
What happens if the job takes longer than you estimated?
That is my problem, not yours. The fixed price is agreed in writing before work starts and it does not move afterwards. The only thing that changes a price is you adding something that was not in the brief, and then we agree the new number before I build it.
Do I have to take the $79 care plan?
No. Say so at the start and I will price the build alone. You get the source code, you arrange your own hosting, and you owe nothing monthly. The plan exists because most owners want a website rather than a second job, not because the build depends on it.
Want the number for your job?
Tell me how many pages, whether you have the words and photos, and what the site has to do. You get an itemized fixed price back within 24 hours, free, and with no obligation attached to it.