Almost every website quote you’ll receive uses one of three structures. They aren’t just different ways of arriving at a number — they change what the project is likely to feel like, what happens when something goes sideways, and who carries the risk.
Understand the structure before you compare quotes, because two proposals at the same price can be very different deals.
Hourly
You pay for time. A rate, multiplied by hours worked, usually with an estimate up front and an invoice that may or may not match it.
What it’s good at. Work where nobody can predict the scope. If you don’t yet know what the site needs to be, or the project involves figuring something out as you go, hourly is the honest structure. Nobody has to pretend to know the answer in advance.
What it’s bad at. You’re carrying all the risk. If the work takes twice as long as estimated — whether through complexity, inefficiency, or someone learning on your dime — you pay twice as much. “Estimate” is not a commitment, and an estimate/actual gap creates room for billing disputes.
What it quietly rewards. Time spent. Not maliciously — hourly billing charges for time spent, so faster completion reduces billable hours rather than increasing the fee.
Rates vary enormously depending on who you’re hiring — what a small business website actually costs works through the published figures, and how little they agree with each other.
Flat fee
One price for an agreed scope, set before work starts.
What it’s good at. You know the number. The risk of the work running long sits with the person building it, not with you. Budget approval is simple, and there’s no meter running when you send an email.
What it’s bad at — and this matters. Flat fee only works when the scope is knowable in advance. If you’re not sure what you need yet, one of two things happens: either the price is padded to cover the uncertainty, or you hit “that’s outside the scope” partway through and end up negotiating anyway. Neither is dishonest, but both are worse than just billing hourly for exploratory work.
The other failure mode is quieter. A fixed price with a vague scope description gives the builder an incentive to interpret that scope narrowly. The protection against this isn’t trust — it’s a specific written scope agreed before anyone starts.
What it quietly rewards. Efficiency, and tight scoping. Both good, as long as the scope is written down honestly.
Retainer or subscription
A monthly fee, sometimes with a low or zero build cost up front.
What it’s good at. Real ongoing work. If your site needs regular content updates, seasonal changes, an active blog, inventory management, or genuine technical maintenance, a retainer is the right structure: you’re buying continuing labour, and that’s what it’s for.
What it’s bad at. Being sold as a discount. The two published examples reviewed here start around $89–$99/month and run to several hundred — Pronto lists tiers from $99 to $799, WP Buffs from $89 to $359. Two providers are examples, not a market distribution, so do the arithmetic against whatever you’re quoted. At $99/month, three years comes to $3,564 on top of whatever you paid to have the site built.
That’s fine if you’re getting three years of actual work. It’s a bad trade if the monthly fee is really just financing plus hosting.
The question that separates the two. Ask what specifically happens each month for that fee, and ask what happens to your website if you stop paying. If the answer to the first is vague, and the answer to the second is “it goes offline,” you’re renting.
What it quietly rewards. Retention. Which is fine when the value is real and worth watching when it isn’t.
The lens that cuts through all of it
Every pricing model optimizes for something. Hourly optimizes for time spent. Flat fee optimizes for efficiency and firm scope. Subscription pricing continues while the service continues, so compare the ongoing deliverables with the recurring cost.
None of these is corrupt. But knowing what a structure rewards tells you where to pay attention — and what to get in writing.
Regardless of which model you’re quoted, these three answers matter more than the number:
- What exactly is included, in writing, before work starts? Vague scope creates room for billing disputes in any pricing model.
- What happens when I want something that isn’t in the scope? A good answer is specific and unsurprised. “We’ll figure it out” is not an answer.
- What do I keep if this relationship ends? Applies to all three models. It’s just most urgent with subscriptions.
Those are three of the questions worth asking before you hire anyone — how to hire a web designer covers the rest, including the uncomfortable ones.
When each one fits
Choose hourly when the work is genuinely exploratory, or when you need a small amount of ongoing help and don’t want to commit to a package.
Choose flat fee when you know roughly what you need and want budget certainty. Flat fee often fits a well-defined brochure or lead-generation project where the scope can be agreed in advance.
Choose a retainer when there’s real recurring work to do — and confirm what that work is before signing.
Where TruePoint sits
Flat fee is the model we sell, so weigh this section accordingly.
Three fixed scopes, agreed before anything starts, with no retainer required to have a website built. If the build takes longer than expected, that’s our problem, not a change to your invoice. The tradeoff is the one described above: the scope has to be settled up front, so we spend real time on that before quoting. If your project is genuinely exploratory — you don’t yet know what the site should be — we’ll say so, and hourly work from someone else may serve you better than a fixed scope that doesn’t fit.
On the recurring side: there’s no maintenance retainer. These are static sites with no database, CMS, or plugins, so the recurring update-and-security work is far smaller than on a CMS stack — hosting, DNS, and forms still exist, but not as a standing monthly obligation to bill against. Defects in the agreed scope are fixed free for 30 days after launch; after that, changes are quoted per job.
If you want the specifics of what each scope covers, they’re listed on the website packages page. If you’re trying to work out what a project like yours should cost in the first place, what a small business website actually costs covers the real ranges and where the published figures come from.