02 / WHAT IT COSTS

The number is agreed before the work starts.

You do not buy a bag of hours. Builds start at €3,500 and ongoing care at €95 a month, though neither figure means much until the audit works out what the system actually needs. What the audit produces is a scope with one fixed price against it, agreed in writing before anything begins. I take one business per niche per market, so a competitor cannot buy the same system.

Cost Context

The figure this usually gets compared to.

The comparison people reach for first is a hire. A senior engineer in Europe on a €90,000 salary costs €110,000 to €115,000 fully loaded, roughly €9,200 to €9,600 a month once employer contributions, tooling and management are counted, and senior technical recruitment averages 5.4 months. The exact figure moves with the market you hire in. What does not move is that it buys one person in one discipline. The comparison that tells you more is the one against your current setup, which the cost calculator totals, including the parts that never reach an invoice.

Maintain retainer
€1,200/mo
vs €9,200/mo in-house equivalent
Partner retainer
€2,500/mo
vs €9,200/mo in-house equivalent
Embedded retainer
€5,000/mo
vs €9,200/mo in-house equivalent
What happens first

Every engagement starts with a short conversation.

The fee is fixed and agreed before any work starts, and a free twenty-five minute conversation comes first, which works out whether there is a problem here worth looking at. The audit itself runs across the servers, the site, the data and the automations between them, and ends in a written assessment you own. The contact page covers what is in it.

€450 one-time, fixed

If a build or a retainer follows, I credit the €450 in full against it.

Book a 25-minute diagnostic
Findings in priority order, with effort and impact against each
A fixed build price, or a retainer tier, whichever the findings support
Yours to keep, whether or not anything follows
Build Engagements

Build engagements.

One-time builds, scoped after the audit and delivered against milestones.

Foundation
€3,500
Starting point, not a package
VPS provisioned and configured to your workload
Single-discipline WordPress build
Strategy session and architecture brief
Performance baseline from day one
Form automation and CRM connection
Full handover documentation included
1 month Maintain retainer included
Book a 25-minute diagnostic
Flagship
€12,000+
Starting point, not a package
VPS or dedicated server provisioned to scope
Complete cross-discipline architecture
Infrastructure plus Web plus Data plus Automation
Custom integrations and pipeline engineering
Performance hardening
Full documentation, runbooks and handover
3 months Maintain retainer included
Book a 25-minute diagnostic
After the build

Not everything needs operating.

A site with a contact form on it and a platform with moving parts do not need the same attention, and they are not charged as though they do. This is the light option, for a system built here that needs keeping safe rather than watching over. It does not take one of the three engagement slots.

€95 /mo

Or €950 paid annually. Only on a system built or rebuilt here.

Book a 25-minute diagnostic
Core, plugin and theme updates, with a render check after
Security monitoring and patching
Uptime monitoring
Offsite backups, with a restore that has been tested
Certificate and domain expiry watched
A short monthly note, including the months when nothing needed doing
Not included
Content changes
New pages, features or design work
Server and hosting management
Performance and SEO work
Same-day incident response
Anything needing a judgement call per request
Ongoing Operations

Ongoing care, matched to the system.

Four levels, matched to how much operational surface the system actually has. Partner is the level I recommend by default. It is the first one where engineering is part of the month rather than changes as they come up, and what a business gets from keeping one engineer is mostly what that engineer builds next. The three levels above Upkeep are a cap on the monthly bill, not a quantity of hours. Retainers bill monthly in advance. Upkeep does not use one of the three engagements I run at a time, because it is built to need almost none of the attention that cap exists to protect.

Maintain
€1,200 /mo
Updates, backups and monitoring, plus the server itself
Uptime, security and performance monitored continuously
Ongoing content and system changes within the agreed operating scope
Quarterly performance review
Incident handling, with a written response window
Book a 25-minute diagnostic
Embedded
€5,000 /mo
Everything in Partner
The whole technical function, not a slice of it
Quarterly roadmap and architecture planning
First on every incident, ahead of other work
A direct line to the person who built it
Book a 25-minute diagnostic
By Service Area

Starting points across all four disciplines.

Every service can be built here, or taken on and operated afterwards. Optimising happens inside an engagement rather than as something you buy on its own.

01
Infrastructure

Servers, DNS, security, pipelines. I keep them up.

From €1,500
Starting point, scoped per engagement
02
Web Presence

Your site stops describing the business you were two years ago.

From €1,500
Starting point, scoped per engagement
03
Data

Your CRM, your content and your reporting, connected, so you can see what is happening.

From €1,800
Starting point, scoped per engagement
04
Automation

The copying between tools that somebody on your team is still doing by hand.

From €1,800
Starting point, scoped per engagement
Common Questions

Questions this usually comes down to

Because the scope is not fixed until the audit produces one. The figures here are starting points, not packages.
The audit produces a written scope with a fixed price against it, and that number does not move unless the scope does.
I absorb small changes. Anything that moves the scope is re-scoped at a new fixed price before the work continues, and nothing reaches an invoice that you have not agreed to first.
50% upfront, 50% on delivery. Larger engagements can run on a milestone schedule instead.
Yes. The work runs across Europe and Africa, and everything is quoted and invoiced in euros whatever the market.

Something not answered here?

Ask your question

Prefer to talk? Booking is on the contact page.

The first step

The price starts with the problem.

Every number on this page is a starting point until the audit produces a scope, and the twenty-five minutes is where you find out whether the audit is worth doing at all.

Twenty-five minutes on Google Meet, and a straight answer either way.

  1. 01

    You describe what you are running, in whatever words you use for it internally.

  2. 02

    You get a straight answer on whether the audit is worth doing at all, including when it is not.