When a business needs logins, member data, bookings, or dashboards, it has stopped needing a website and started needing software. Discovery first, then a written scope with a fixed price, then staged billing as each piece ships.
Discovery first Fixed written scope You own the work outright
The dividing line is whether people log in. If visitors read, decide, and call, a website is the cheaper and better answer. Once someone needs an account and their own data, you have crossed into software.
Discovery works out which of these you genuinely need. Most projects use four or five, and paying for the rest is the usual way these builds get expensive.
Each stage is invoiced as it ships, so the cost tracks the work rather than arriving in one lump at an uncertain end.
A project that needed more structure than a set of pages could carry.
Clarke/Gray Hockey needed schedules, scores, standings, and events in one place that players check between shifts at work. That means a site people return to daily rather than visit once, which changes what has to be fast and what has to be easy to update mid-season.
Discovery produces a fixed written figure before any build begins, and every stage is invoiced as it ships. Care plans at $99 or $399 a month are optional and never a condition of the work.
What comes up before a project is scoped.
Most projects run a few thousand and up, and the honest answer is that a number before discovery would be a guess. Two projects described in the same sentence can differ by a factor of five once you know how many roles there are, what has to be stored, and what it needs to talk to. Discovery produces a fixed written figure, and you decide from there.
Usually a week or two of back and forth rather than a long engagement. We work through who uses the thing, what each of them needs to do, what data it holds, and what it connects to. The output is a written scope with a fixed price and a stage plan, which is yours to keep whether or not you build it with us.
Often, yes. A portal can live behind a login on your existing site so customers move between the two without noticing a seam. Where the current site is on a platform that fights it, we will say so and price the alternative rather than forcing it and charging you for the struggle.
You do, outright. Custom project work is yours on handover, including the source, and there is no licence tying it to us. This is different from the Lead Machine, where the estimator and dashboard are our own software running for you as part of a monthly plan.
No. You can take the handover and run it wherever you like. If you would rather not think about servers, updates, and backups, the care plans are $99 or $399 a month depending on how much of it we look after. Neither is a condition of the build.
Tell us who logs in and what they need to get done. We will tell you whether this is a website, a plan, or a scoped project, and what each one would cost you.
Most enquiries get a reply the same day, usually within a couple of hours.
