Projects start at $3,999. Most land between $3,999 and $50,000 and up. Both of those numbers are on the homepage, which puts us in a small minority: almost nobody in this category publishes anything.
What withholding a price actually protects
The standard reasons for keeping it off the site are that every project is different, that a number without context invites the wrong comparison, and that a conversation lets you explain the value first. All three are true. None of them is the real reason.
The real reason is that an unpublished price lets you quote a different one to different people, and lets you find out what somebody will pay before you say what something costs. That is a legitimate way to run a business. It is not a way we want to run this one, and it carries a cost the studio pays rather than the client: every enquiry becomes a call, and most of those calls end at the moment the number is finally said out loud.
What we publish instead
A floor, so nobody with a $600 budget spends a week in a conversation that was never going to work. A band, so a serious buyer can tell whether they are in the right shop. And then the four things that actually move the number, because a range without its drivers is just a range.
- The number of unique page templates and states.
- Whether brand and identity work is included.
- Custom functionality, integrations, and CMS work.
- Content: whether copy and imagery already exist.
That list is the estimate. Somebody who reads it can place themselves roughly on the scale before writing to us, and the enquiries that arrive have already done it. It is the difference between a first call that starts at "what does this cost" and one that starts at "here is what we are trying to do".
The part that does the most work
Next to the prices there is a panel listing four reasons to hire us and four reasons not to. The second list is the one that matters. It says, in plain words, that we are the wrong choice if you need a large team working in parallel to a fixed date, if the work has to pass through several rounds of committee, or if you want a template configured quickly and cheaply.
Every one of those is a real enquiry we have had and should not have taken. Naming them costs us the enquiries we would have turned down anyway, and it buys the only thing a studio site can buy from a stranger, which is the sense that it is not trying to win them. Nobody who is selling to everyone is telling you the truth about fit.
What it has cost
Fewer enquiries. That is the point, and it is only a good trade if the ones that arrive are better — a claim we would rather measure than assert. So we are measuring it, from a baseline we only started keeping properly this month. When there is a year of it we will say what happened, including if the answer is that this was a bad idea.
Gal Etrog · SILICA