The questions worth asking.

Because most of what an agency bills for is not the building. It is the meetings, the document that summarises the meetings, the account manager who attends both, and the six weeks the file sits waiting for a designer with capacity. Take those out and what is left is a few days of work. What you pay is what the work costs, not what the market is used to paying.

A person scopes it on the call, reads every version before you do, and answers your mail. What a person is not doing is typing the same booking form for the eleventh time. That split is the entire business model, and it is why the price can be what it is.

No — the layouts are drawn from your brief and the words are written for your business. But the parts underneath that should be identical every time, the checkout and the reminder mails and the accessibility checks, are identical every time. That is not a template, it is the difference between the parts worth doing again and the parts worth doing once.

Usually. If it is on a common platform we can work with it or move it; if it is a custom build nobody has touched in six years, moving it is often cheaper than maintaining it and we will tell you which on the call. Either way the redirects come from what people were actually visiting, so nothing that had traffic quietly stops existing.

No, and we will not pretend to with generated images. Good photographs of your actual premises are the single biggest visual upgrade available to a small business site and they need somebody local with a camera. We will tell you what shots to get and lay them out properly.

One language is in the price. A second is quoted as a fixed addition, and it is a real translation that a person has read, not a machine pass that turns your opening hours into nonsense in the other half of the country.

You do, from the first commit — not at the end, and not after the final invoice clears. The repository is yours, the domain is registered in your name, and the payment, mail and analytics accounts are yours. If you walk away there is nothing to hand over, because nothing was being held.

No. The site is yours and it keeps working. What the monthly buys is somebody applying the security updates, testing that the backups restore, and making small changes the same day you ask for them. Without it, that becomes your job or nobody's — and nobody's is how most small-business sites end up three years out of date.

In the first month, nothing leaves the building without a person pressing send, so the first mistakes are caught in a drafts folder rather than by a customer. You correct it in a sentence, the brief changes, and it stays corrected. If a role is wrong often enough to be work rather than help, stop paying for it — that is what a monthly with a month's notice is for.

Yes, where a role writes to them. The message says a system wrote it and names who to reach for a person. Nothing goes out under the name of somebody who did not write it, and this is not a setting you can switch off.

It is instead of the three hours on Sunday evening. Somebody who knows your customers, catches what is off and handles the phone call that is really a complaint is doing work none of these roles do. If you have that person, the roles take the filing and the chasing off them.

Read access to the account the money arrives in, so it can match payments against open invoices. It has no payment method, no card and no right to authorise a transfer. Where money has to move, you move it.

That is how most people should start. Take whichever one is currently costing you an evening a week, run it for a month, and add another only once the first has stopped being interesting. Six at once is a bigger change than a small business needs to make in one go.

Then the honest answer might be that you do not need the role. The roles are for work that currently happens by hand or does not happen at all. Where you have a system that works, connecting to it is usually a better idea than replacing it, and that is a build rather than a subscription.

No. A monthly licence and a fee per project that goes live. What you bill your client is between you and your client, and we never see it.

Not from anything they receive. Your domain, your logo, your contract, your support address, and no powered-by line in the footer of the sites you ship. We never contact them, because we do not have their details.

The licence includes the source of what you are running, so a project you have already delivered keeps working whatever happens to us. That is the only answer to this question that is worth anything, and any licence that cannot give it should be read carefully.

Yes — the roles are part of the licence, and they are usually the easier sale, because a client who already trusts you with their site is a much shorter conversation than a stranger. You set the price.

In the same canton, possibly. In practice the constraint on this work is not demand, it is the number of businesses that have heard of it at all, and a competitor who ships properly is worth more to that than an exclusive territory nobody is working.

Not under this name, and there is no client list on this site because there is nothing honest to put on one yet. What there is instead is this site — built with the same pipeline, checked by the same checks, and open to being inspected as closely as you like. That is a smaller claim than a portfolio and it has the advantage of being true.

Your repository, your domain, your accounts, your data. Everything is already on your side, so what you lose is us, not the thing you paid for. This is worth checking with any supplier you are about to depend on, and most of them cannot answer it as flatly.

Switzerland. The work is done in writing and on calls, which is how a shop like this can be useful to a business two valleys away without either side driving anywhere.

Photography, print, brand identity from scratch, advertising campaigns, anything under health-data rules, and anything that has to be right to the franken every time without a much stricter level of checking than a week buys. For all of those we would rather name somebody than take the work.