What $1,500 actually buys you in a website.

The honest answer surprises people.

Tell a small-business owner a new site runs $1,500, and a common first question is "What's the catch?"

There isn't one. There's just a very specific reason I can charge $1,500 for something a bigger agency quotes at $12,000, and it's not that I'm cutting corners. It's that I'm a one-person shop running on one-person overhead. No account managers to pay. No office lease in a glass building downtown. No seven-figure marketing budget I need your project to subsidize.

What's included for $1,500

A four-page site, launched, from my web design services. Here's the full list:

• Discovery call — 30-60 minutes where I actually listen to your business before designing anything.
• Four pages of custom design, responsive on phone, tablet, and desktop. Typically: Home, About, Services, Contact.
• Two revision rounds, at design and at build.
• Copy review — I'll rewrite whatever you send me into something tighter. If you need the copy written from scratch, that's a separate project.
• Technical SEO baseline — meta tags, semantic HTML, fast load times, a sitemap, schema markup. The stuff Google needs to take you seriously.
• Contact form wired up to a real handler, not a broken mailto: link.
• Accessibility pass — proper alt text, keyboard navigation, readable color contrast.
• Launch, including DNS pointing and SSL.
• 30 days of free post-launch fixes for anything that's clearly my mistake.

What's not included

I'm more useful if you know this up front.

• E-commerce. If you need a Shopify or WooCommerce storefront, that's its own animal, quoted after scoping because it depends on the store. (The custom Shopify rebuild of printwithhonor.com for Honor Printing + Design is on my work page.)
• Booking or scheduling systems. Integrating Calendly or Acuity is easy; a custom booking flow isn't.
• Professional photography. If you don't have decent photos of yourself or your work, you need a photographer before you need me.
• Copywriting from scratch. I can edit. Writing a brand's entire voice from nothing is a separate project.
• Ongoing hosting and maintenance. That's the care plan, from $50/month: optional, month to month, cancel anytime.

Where cheap-website horror stories come from

A lot of "I got ripped off" stories trace back to the same mistake: the client paid someone to build a website but not to think about one.

There's a massive difference between "I can put a WordPress theme on a domain for $500" and "I can look at your business, ask what you actually need customers to do when they land here, and design a site that makes that happen."

The first one is a commodity. You can get it from Fiverr, from your cousin, from any Squarespace template. It's worth about $500.

The second one is a service. It takes hours of thinking, not hours of clicking. It's worth what a good small-business lawyer or accountant charges — because it's the same kind of work.

So why $1,500 and not $12,000?

Because I don't have twelve people to feed before you get the value.

A $12,000 agency project has a strategist, an art director, a designer, a developer, a QA person, a project manager, and an account manager all billing against your budget. Half of them don't touch your site. They touch the spreadsheet that tracks your site.

When you work with me, you pay for the hours that actually make your site better. That's it.

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Thinking about a new site? Tell me about your business — free 30-minute call, then a fixed-price proposal in writing.