What a personal-brand website costs
What moves the price of a website for a coach, healer or creator, what you should own at the end, and the running costs nobody mentions in the quote.
Quotes for a personal-brand website vary so widely that the numbers are close to useless on their own. What makes them comparable is knowing what drives the price and what you own when it is done. This piece names the drivers, so you can read any quote, ours included, line by line.
What drives the cost of a personal-brand website?
| Driver | Cheaper | Dearer |
|---|---|---|
| Pages | A handful, one per offering | Many, with articles and events |
| Words | You write them | Written for you from your material |
| Bookings and payments | A contact form | A calendar, payments, courses or memberships |
| Design | A good template, well set up | A custom look built for you |
| Photography | Your own photographs | A shoot |
What are the running costs?
- The domain, renewed every year.
- Hosting, monthly or yearly, depending on the platform.
- Any booking, payment or email tool, usually by subscription.
- Changes you cannot make yourself, if the site was built without a way for you to edit it.
What should you own at the end?
Everything: the domain, the hosting account, the site, the words and the photographs, in your name from the start. A site held in a designer's account is a site you rent. Ask before you pay who the domain is registered to.
How do we price it?
Per build, under the Tailored tier on our pricing page, with the figure given before anything is built. Channeling with Emily, a site for a medium and healer in California, was quoted as one figure before work began, and is in final review. The studio is in Karachi and keeps New York hours, which suits clients in the United States, overlaps the afternoon for clients in the Netherlands and Europe, and puts us a short drive away for clients in Pakistan.
Do you need a website before you have an audience?
You need one before the audience arrives, which can be sooner than you expect. The Poster Project, the founder's own brand, reached 2.2M views in 90 days from a small account, most of them organic. Reach comes before followers, and a visitor who arrives from a post that travelled needs somewhere to land.
When is a cheaper route better?
When you are still testing what you offer. A site builder and an afternoon of writing will tell you whether people get in touch. Pay for a built site when the offerings are settled and the site is costing you clients by being unclear.