Questions
The questions you would rather not ask on a call.
Grouped by topic and answered plainly. If yours is not here, ask it through the contact page and hear back the same working day.
25 minutes · Google Meet · the call itself is free
1 of 5
Whether this fits
If you are building something and want it done properly from the start, yes. If you already run something that works and needs one person answerable for it, yes. If the cheapest option is the goal, BespokeForge is not it, and the call says so rather than wasting a month of yours.
A freelancer brings one skill, usually the one you asked about rather than the one causing the problem. An agency brings overhead, junior developers and an account manager who never touches the work. BespokeForge is one engineer across the servers, the site, the data and the automations between them, and the same person is still there afterwards. About sets out how that holds up when it is only one person.
No. You know your business and where you are taking it; BespokeForge handles the technical side. The call is mostly about how the business actually runs, not about the stack. You do not need to understand it to make good decisions about it.
Then that is the scope, and the other three disciplines stay out of it. The four describe what one person can be answerable for, not a bundle you have to take. Plenty of systems only need the web layer looked after, and the audit establishes whether yours is one of them or whether the thing causing the problem sits underneath it.
They carry on doing what they are good at. The gap BespokeForge fills is usually the one nobody was given: the servers, the integrations, and the decisions that cross all of it, which sit underneath the work an agency or a marketing team is hired for. That only holds if it is written down, so the audit records who owns what before anything starts.
2 of 5
Cost and scope
Because the audit decides which build fits and what its scope holds. As a reference point, builds start at €3,500 and retainers at €1,200 a month; smaller single-discipline work is scoped from the audit and quoted then. Upkeep, at €95 a month, is a lighter rung, only on systems built or rebuilt here. The pricing page carries the rest.
No, and not because hourly billing is unprofitable. It pays for time rather than for the thing working, and it puts a meter on every question you might want to ask, which is the quickest way to stop a client asking. A build is a fixed price agreed before work starts. Above Upkeep, a retainer is a fixed monthly fee rather than a quantity of hours, so a quiet month costs what a busy one does and nobody is counting.
Yes: the build stands on its own, at its base price or the price the audit fixes in writing. You hold the domain, the DNS and the repository from the first week, and the server too unless you choose to host with BespokeForge, and the finished build goes into them at handover, so leaving with it is a handover rather than a negotiation. What you would have then is a system with nobody watching it, which is what most of the market sells. That call is yours.
Because the diagnosis is the part with the value in it. Twenty-five minutes on a call establishes whether there is a problem worth looking at; it does not establish what is causing it. Finding that out means going through the servers, the site, the data and the automations between them, and it produces a written document you own whether or not anything follows. The €450 is credited in full against a build or a retainer, so if you go ahead, you have paid nothing for it.
3 of 5
How the work runs
It depends on scope, and any number given today would be a guess. The timeline is agreed in writing during the architecture phase, before any code is written, so what you get is a date rather than an estimate that quietly moves.
Delivery is where most of the market leaves, and where this arrangement starts. Every build carries one to three months of the Maintain retainer, depending on its size, and after that you can stay on the level that matches how much operational surface the system actually has. Operate sets out what a month covers.
Yes, and that is a route of its own rather than a consolation prize. If what you have works well enough, the job is not to build it a second time; it is for one person to be answerable for it from here. The audit decides whether that is possible, and if the answer is no, it says so then rather than after you have paid for a rebuild.
With a short conversation, twenty-five minutes and free, which works out whether this is a problem BespokeForge can solve and which of the two routes you are on. It decides whether to look; it is not the looking itself. If it is worth going further, the next step is the audit at €450, credited in full against a build or a retainer, whichever follows. The contact page covers what the audit looks at.
Three Technical Partner clients at a time. That is the number at which the person who built the thing is still the person who answers when it breaks, which is the arrangement itself rather than a device to make you hurry. SearchOps and Upkeep never take one of the three: they are defined systems, run to a written scope. BespokeForge also takes one business per niche per market, so a competitor cannot buy the same system. If all three places are full when you ask, the call says so, with roughly when that changes.
No, and anyone who does is quoting one lucky run. The real shape of it, from nine desktop runs against one client homepage across three European regions: every run came back between 96 and 99, and First Contentful Paint stayed between 357 and 435 ms across the whole set. That is what a settled measurement looks like, and it is settled because the page is served from cache and the runs were spaced minutes apart. What BespokeForge commits to is the method and the metrics underneath the score: spaced samples, a before and an after measured the same way, and Largest Contentful Paint, layout stability and page weight reported as they land.
Faster than most owners expect, and the ceiling depends on what the site has to do and what it runs on. The reference point is one of the heavier systems under retainer here: product data, calculators and a large article library behind a four-layer cache stack. On desktop that homepage starts painting in under half a second, finishes its largest element in about a second, ships 280 KB of HTML that arrives as 62 KB over the wire, and does not shift its layout. Desktop Lighthouse across three European regions ran 96 to 99 in October 2026. Those are desktop figures, labelled that way on purpose. Where your own ceiling sits is one of the things the audit answers, before anyone promises a number.
4 of 5
After it is live
Three levels, matched to how much operational surface the system has, from Maintain at €1,200 a month to a whole technical function at €5,000 a month. Upkeep, at €95 a month, is a lighter subscription, not a retainer. Above Upkeep the fee is fixed each month rather than a quantity of hours, which is the part that matters in a quiet month. Operate lists what each level covers, and the pricing page carries the figures.
A message through the contact form is answered the same working day, including when the answer is no. Above Upkeep, a retainer buys a response window for incidents, agreed per engagement and written into it. Upkeep has none: it is a subscription to the routine, and incident response is what the retainers are for.
These systems are built so that a normal week needs nobody to touch them, which is the part that actually covers you. Where something needs hands meanwhile, BespokeForge brings in engineers it already works with, for a defined piece of work, and stays answerable for it; nobody else takes over your account. And you hold the keys from the first week, and the written record as the work is paid for, so nothing you depend on sits behind one person. About sets out the three arrangements that make that true.
Yes. A retainer runs for a minimum of three months, the time it takes to reach a steady state, then rolls monthly with thirty days notice either way. There is no annual lock-in, and nothing about the arrangement depends on you being unable to leave it.
New features, new pages and major rebuilds. Those are quoted separately before they happen: you hear that a thing sits outside the retainer before anyone touches it, not on the invoice afterwards. Upkeep excludes more than the levels above it, content changes and the server itself included, and its page lists that in full.
No. Being answerable for a system means knowing it, and knowing a system somebody else built is the expensive part, which €95 a month cannot carry. Systems built elsewhere come in through the audit and go to Maintain or above. Taking on a stranger's system cheaply is how a maintenance plan turns into an incident queue, and that is the failure this practice is arranged to avoid.
5 of 5
SearchOps and Upkeep
No. Every site has a search layer to read, so SearchOps starts from the Search Baseline: €250 once, ordered from a form, with a report in ten working days. A call is there if you want one.
A one-time reading of your search: where the site appears, what search can and cannot read, the structured data, the content opportunities, three competitors, local search and AI-search visibility, and a 90-day plan in priority order. It reads the search layer and changes nothing on the site. The report is yours whether or not anything follows.
No. Both are Managed Services: defined systems with a written scope and a published price, so neither needs the principal engineer's direct attention the way a build or a retainer does. Expand and Network, the larger SearchOps plans, share three places of their own.
Upkeep, at €95 a month, keeps a finished site safe: updates, security, tested backups and expiry dates, with a short note each month, only on systems built or rebuilt here and without the server. Maintain, at €1,200 a month, keeps the engineer on the system, server included, with changes within the agreed scope, and takes one of the three places.
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