Every studio has a shape. Ours is narrow on purpose: custom marketing and service websites, built as static files, fixed scope, fixed price, handed over in full.
Plenty of good businesses need something else. Below are the cases where we are the wrong choice, and what to look at instead. If one of them describes you, take the suggestion — it costs far less to find this out now than in week three.
You need to edit your own content weekly
We don’t build with a content management system. That’s what keeps the site portable and cheap to run, and it’s also the trade: you can’t log in and rewrite a page yourself. Changes go through us, quoted per job.
If your prices, staff, menu, or events change every week, that’s a genuine requirement and it should decide who builds your site. Look at Squarespace or a WordPress site with a proper editor. You’ll pay a subscription and accept the platform’s constraints, and in return you’ll be able to change your own words at 9pm on a Tuesday.
You need to sell things or take payments
Ecommerce, online stores, and payment processing are not part of any package, at any tier. This isn’t a scoping conversation — it’s a category we don’t build.
Look at Shopify for a real store, or Square if you mostly need to take payment for a service. Both do the parts that are hard — tax, inventory, refunds, card data — better than a custom build at our prices ever would.
You need logins, portals, or member areas
Customer accounts, client portals, and members-only sections are excluded for the same reason. Once a site has accounts it has a database, sessions, password resets, and a security surface that has to be maintained forever. That’s software, not a website.
Look for a web application developer, or an off-the-shelf portal product built for your industry. Expect the budget to start well above ours.
You need integrations or a custom application
Live inventory, a CRM syncing both ways, a booking system tied to your scheduling software, anything with an API in the middle. Not offered.
Look for a developer or small agency who builds applications and will scope the integration work directly. Ask them what happens when the third-party API changes, and get the answer in writing.
You collect health information
If your intake or booking form asks about symptoms, conditions, or treatment history, our hosting doesn’t permit it. Where we can, we’ll route that part of the job to a specialist provider. Where we can’t, we decline the project and refund in full.
Look for a provider who works in healthcare specifically and can speak to compliant hosting and forms without being prompted.
A site builder genuinely serves you better right now
If a few hundred dollars is the realistic ceiling, and you’d rather tinker than brief someone, a builder is the better call. Modern templates look good. Undesigned isn’t the same as bad.
Look at Squarespace or Wix. Know the trade you’re making: Wix’s own documentation says a Wix site can’t be exported or hosted elsewhere, and Squarespace’s export produces a limited file aimed at WordPress. That may be an entirely acceptable deal. It is worth making it knowingly.
You don’t have customers yet
A website is a place to send people. It is not, by itself, a source of them. If you’re still testing whether the business works, money spent on a site is money not spent finding out.
Set up a Google Business Profile, put a single page or a Facebook page up, and go get the first ten customers. Come back when the phone is ringing and the site is the thing making you look smaller than you are.
You want someone on the phone regularly
This studio runs on email. There is no account manager, no standing call, no phone number that gets picked up during a build. That’s part of how one person can build sites at these prices.
Some people find that a relief and some find it cold. If you want to talk something through as you think it out loud, hire a local designer you can sit down with. You’ll pay more for the time. For some owners it’s worth every dollar of it.
Some categories we decline outright
Adult content, gambling, firearms, cannabis, online pharmacies, credit repair and debt collection, multi-level marketing, telemarketing, escort services, and anything unlawful. The full list is in our project terms.
This isn’t a judgment about those businesses. Building them would put our payment processor, host, and registrar accounts at risk, and losing any of those would take every client’s website offline at once. If one is bought by mistake, we refund in full and say which category applied.
If none of these describe you
Then the fit is probably fine. What each scope covers sets out Essential at $250, Growth at $500, and Authority at $1,000, with the page counts and revision rounds for each.
And if you’re not sure which case you’re in, email projects@truepointbyazimuth.com and describe the business. If the honest answer is one of the cases above, that’s the answer you’ll get back.