The honest answer: the setup fee is below cost right now.
A Starter site takes me roughly 8–12 hours to build well — intake review, design decisions, writing the code, setting up the local SEO, testing across devices, getting it live. At any agency that pays their developers market rate, that's $1,200–$2,400 in labor alone before you add overhead.
I charge $99 for Starter right now. That is below cost. I know that.
The reason is straightforward: I'm building the first ten client relationships. The founding rate exists to close the gap between "Logan says he's good" and "Logan has a track record." The first ten businesses who sign get a subsidized site. I do the work anyway because every one of those builds is a real case study I can point to.
The setup fee goes up after those ten spots because, at that point, the math has to work. $199 for a Starter site is still cheap. $499 for an agency Standard site would be insulting to the client — mine is $299 right now for a chatbot-included build that takes me longer and requires more configuration.
What the monthly fee actually covers.
$49/month sounds like hosting. It isn't just hosting.
Hosting for a Next.js site on Vercel at this traffic level costs roughly $0–20/month. Domain registration runs $15–18/year, call it $1.50/month. So the infrastructure alone is under $22/month.
The rest — roughly $27–30 — is the monthly edit allowance. About one hour of my time. That's not me being generous. That's the job. Business hours change. New services get added. A photo needs to be swapped. A service description goes stale. With most platforms, you'd do this yourself and get it wrong, or pay a developer $100–200 for a one-hour job. With me, you text or call and it gets done.
On Standard and Pro, the chatbot adds cost too — API calls to the language model, infrastructure to serve it, and the time I spent configuring it for your business. Those plans are priced to cover it.
Why I didn't price it like an agency.
A typical Long Island web agency charges $2,500–5,000 upfront for a five-page site. They have a sales team, an account manager, a project manager, and a junior developer who does the actual build. You're paying for all four of those people even though you'll only talk to one of them.
I have none of that overhead. I'm one person. I answer my own phone. I write every line of code. The margin I'd need to sustain a team doesn't exist in my cost structure, so I don't charge it.
There is a real cost I do pass on: my time. If you're on Standard and you ask me for a new landing page or a chatbot workflow overhaul, that's hours I can't spend on intake calls or builds for other clients. That work gets quoted at a flat rate before I start. That's the only place where extra billing happens, and you approve it before I do anything.
The monthly rate is locked for life. Here's why that matters.
Most subscription businesses raise prices on existing customers when they can get away with it. I don't do that. Once you're subscribed, your monthly rate is your rate forever — as long as you stay subscribed.
This isn't a marketing line. It's a practical constraint: if I raised prices on existing clients, they'd leave. The value of a locked-in monthly rate for you is real. The constraint it puts on me is also real. It means I can't price myself into a hole on the monthly side — $49/month has to be viable long-term. It is, because the edit volume on a five-page local business site is predictably low.
If you cancel and come back, current rates apply. That's the one condition. Staying subscribed is what locks the rate.
What you're actually comparing against.
Squarespace Business costs $23–36/month depending on billing, with no developer, no SEO setup, and you doing all the updates yourself. Their personal plan (no custom domain) is $16/month. Wix is comparable.
A web agency retainer in Nassau County runs $300–1,000/month for a site you don't own and an account manager who relays your requests to a developer you'll never talk to.
My pricing sits below both in terms of what you actually get — a custom-built site, on your domain, with the code in your hands if you ever leave, and a developer who picks up the phone. I'm not claiming to be the cheapest option. I'm claiming to be the best ratio of quality to cost for a small business in Nassau County right now.
The chatbot: why it's a separate plan tier, not an add-on.
The AI chatbot on Standard and Pro isn't a feature I bolt on — it takes real work to configure well. I have to train it on your specific services, your pricing signals, your tone, your FAQs, and what to do when someone asks something it doesn't know. A poorly configured chatbot actively hurts conversions. I've seen them. They give wrong answers, ramble, and fail to capture contact info when a visitor is ready.
I bundle it into the plan rather than selling it as an add-on because the right way to do it requires building the site and the chatbot at the same time. The chatbot's training data is the site content. Splitting that into two separate purchases creates a gap that usually results in a bad chatbot.
The $79/month Standard rate covers the API cost to run the chatbot (language model calls) plus the configuration work amortized over the subscription life. If you cancel Standard, the chatbot goes dark. There's no way to keep the chatbot without the hosting relationship, because I maintain the configuration.
The one thing I won't do.
I won't quote you a project, deliver something that doesn't meet the spec, and then charge extra to fix it. Every deliverable is defined before I start. If the final product doesn't match what we agreed, that's on me — no additional charge to correct it.
I also won't start a project until I have everything I need from you. If I start without your content and have to stop midway because the intake was incomplete, we both lose time. The timeline I quote you assumes you send me what I need on day one.
If any of this sounds like a developer worth talking to, the call is free.