The questions you would rather not have to ask on a call.

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 you need the cheapest option, I am not it, and I will say so on the call rather than waste a month of yours.

A freelancer brings one skill, which is 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. What you get here 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, and I handle the technical side. On the call I mostly ask 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 is what 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 this 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 actually hired for. That arrangement only holds if it is written down, so the audit records who owns what before anything starts.

Because the scope is not fixed until the audit produces one, and a list would only be a guess with a number on it. As a reference point, builds start at €3,500, single-service work at €1,500, and retainers at €1,200 a month. Upkeep, at €95 a month, is a lighter rung available only on systems built or rebuilt here. Those are starting points rather than packages, and the pricing page carries the rest.

No, and the reason is not that 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 cap on the monthly bill rather than a quantity of hours, so a quiet month costs you what a busy one does and neither of us is counting.

You can, and the build stands on its own at a fixed price. You hold the server, the domain, the DNS and the repository from the first week, 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 is your call to make rather than mine.

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.

It depends on scope, and any number I gave you today would be a guess. I agree the timeline 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 it is where this arrangement starts. Every build already 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 third time, it is for one person to be answerable for it from here. The audit is what decides whether that is possible, and if the answer is no, I say 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 I can solve and which of the two routes you are on. It decides whether to look, and 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 one follows. The contact page covers what the audit looks at.

Three 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. Upkeep does not take one of the three. It is a subscription to the routine on a site built here, designed to need almost no attention, and needing almost no attention is the whole reason it can cost €95 a month. The three slots exist to protect attention on live engagements, so the cheap rung is not a decoy and there is no ladder anyone is nudging you up. I also take one business per niche per market, so a competitor cannot buy the same system. If all three are full when you ask, I will say so on the call rather than take the work anyway, and tell you roughly when that changes.

No, and anyone who does is quoting you one lucky run. Here is the real shape of it, from a set of desktop runs against one client homepage on a warm cache: every run came back 97, 98 or 99, and First Contentful Paint moved by 11 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 because the runs were spaced minutes apart. Clicked four times in a row, the tool returns the same cached sample, and the perfect consistency is the tell rather than the trophy. What I commit to is the method and the metrics underneath the score: spaced samples, a measured before and a measured after taken 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, a large article library, all sitting behind a four-layer cache stack. On desktop that homepage starts painting at 361 ms, finishes its largest element in about a second, ships 330 KB of HTML that arrives as 76 KB over the wire, and shifts its layout by 0.001, which is nothing a human eye can catch. Desktop Lighthouse across three European regions ran 98 to 99 in August 2026. Those are desktop figures and they are labelled that way on purpose. Where your own ceiling sits is one of the things the audit answers, before anyone promises a number.

Four levels, matched to how much operational surface the system actually has, from Upkeep at €95 a month up to a full technical function at €5,000/mo. Above Upkeep the fee is a cap on the monthly bill rather than a quantity of hours, which is the part that matters in a quiet month. Operate lists what each level covers, and pricing carries the figures.

I answer a message through the contact form the same working day, and that is a promise rather than an average. Above Upkeep, a retainer buys a shorter window, agreed per engagement and written into it. Upkeep does not carry one at all, because it is a subscription to the routine and same-day incident response is what Maintain is 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 while I am out of action, I bring in engineers I already work with, for a defined piece of work. I stay answerable for it either way, and nobody else takes over your account. The part that decides it is already in place: you hold the keys and the written record from the first week, so nothing you depend on sits behind me. About sets out the three arrangements that make that true.

Yes. A retainer runs three months to reach 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. I quote those separately before they happen, and you hear that a thing sits outside the retainer before I touch it, not on the invoice afterwards. Upkeep excludes more than the levels above it, content changes and the server itself included, and pricing 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.