The question comes up a lot: how do you offer a real custom website for $85 a month? Is it actually custom? Is there a catch? Who's doing the work?
Fair questions. Here's the math.
What $85 covers
Foundation is a single-page custom website. Not a template. Not a page builder with a different logo on top. Hand-built, designed for your specific business, fast on mobile, with a contact form that delivers to your inbox.
Every Foundation month includes:
- Hosting and SSL (we run on Cloudflare Workers, which is fast and inexpensive at our scale)
- Daily backups
- Security monitoring
- One hour of content updates per month
- Annual full content review
- Google Business Profile audit at engagement start
- Direct email access to Eric
The time math
Infrastructure cost for a single Foundation site runs a few dollars a month. The real cost is attention. One hour of updates per month is the commitment.. in practice it averages around 45 minutes across the portfolio. Add the annual review amortized monthly, platform overhead, and client check-ins, and it works out to roughly 60-75 minutes of real work per site per month.
At $85, that's around $65-70 per hour of actual attention. Not a premium consulting rate. Not charity. A number that makes it worth doing carefully.
Why it's not lower
There are website builders at $20 a month. Offshore shops that will build and host for less than a tank of gas. Those models work by minimizing attention. You get a template and a ticket queue. When something breaks or you need a change, it goes in the queue.. and the person who responds has never seen your site before.
$85 buys you direct access to the person who built your site and knows it by heart. That's what we're selling.. continuity, not hours.
The goal was a number that makes it worth caring about every site.. not just the high-revenue ones.
Why it's not higher
We set Foundation pricing with two tests. First: would a solo plumber or a first-year hair stylist have to think hard before saying yes? If the number clears that test comfortably, we're in range. Second: would we be embarrassed if a client did the math on what we earn per hour? If no, we're fine.
$85 clears both. It's not extractive. It's a fair trade for a real service. When clients eventually upgrade to Growth, they do it because the Foundation site is earning more than it costs.. not because they got squeezed and needed to escape.
What it doesn't include
Foundation doesn't include SEO management, blog content, or CRM integration. It doesn't include the year-one results guarantee (that's Growth and above). It doesn't include a redesign on demand or a new page structure.
What it includes is a stable, maintained, professional site that works and keeps working. If that's the starting point you need, $85 is the number.