Why we stopped renting websites to clients

For a while we built websites with no upfront fee. The site went live, the client paid monthly, and the build stayed on our platform. If they left, it came down. Plenty of studios still work this way and they will defend it hard. We used to defend it too.

We do not build that way any more, and it is worth explaining why, because it changes what you are actually buying.

What a rented website really costs you

The pitch is attractive and the maths is fine at first. No four figure bill on day one, a small monthly fee, somebody else worrying about hosting and updates. For a business watching its cash flow that is a real benefit, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

The problem shows up later. Three years in, a rented website has usually cost more than a bought one, and the client has nothing to show for it. Stop paying and the thing disappears. Every month of that arrangement quietly increases the cost of leaving, which means the longer somebody stays, the less free they are. That is not a partnership. That is a hostage situation with good manners.

It also does something unhelpful to us. If the only thing keeping a client is that their site comes down when they go, we never have to be worth the money. We would rather be kept because the work is landing.

What we do instead

The design and build is a one-off £1,200, half to book the work into the diary and half on the day the site goes live. That fee buys the website outright. It is yours. If you cancel your plan we export the whole site and hand it over so you can host it wherever you like, and we do that within 14 days.

Your domain, your content, your Google Business Profile and your other accounts are in your name throughout and always were.

After launch there is a monthly plan, Growth at £199 or Local Pro at £299, with a three month minimum and then 7 days notice whenever you want it. What that pays for is the part that genuinely is a service rather than a file: hosting, security, backups, the local SEO work, review requests, missed call text back, lead follow up, and somebody actually watching the thing.

So the split is clean. You own the website. You subscribe to the work.

The catch, stated plainly

If you leave, the service stops. The reviews stop being chased, the missed calls stop being texted back, the SEO work stops, and the site stops being looked after by us. You get a complete, working export of the website, not the machinery around it, because that machinery is a running service on our platform and always was.

That is the honest edge of the deal, and we would rather you heard it here than found it out later.

The questions worth asking any studio

Everyone tells you to ask whether you own the files. That is only half of it, because a folder of code with nobody looking after it goes stale fast. Ask three things instead.

If I pay a build fee, does it buy the site outright, and will you put that in writing?

If I cancel, what exactly do I get, and how long does it take?

And while I am paying you every month, what specifically are you doing that I could point at?

A studio that answers all three without shuffling is a studio worth talking to. We changed our own model because we could not answer the first one well enough, and that bothered us more than the revenue did.