How to Charge Monthly for Web Design
TL;DR
Charge monthly for your ongoing help, not for the website. Treat the website like a marketing campaign: a setup fee covers the first chunk of work, a monthly fee covers the promotion, and there are no contracts.
- Fixed price websites keep getting cheaper. Business owners used to expect $5,000. Now most expect $500 to $1,000.
- Selling websites on subscription isn’t the fix. You do all the work upfront and carry all the risk while the client pays $200 a month.
- Websites are campaigns now. Like ads, they need ongoing work, testing, and reporting.
- Pay a chunk, build a chunk. Our most popular package is a $2,000 setup fee plus $875 per month.
- No contracts, monthly check-ins. A 15-minute lightning meeting each month shows what we did, the results, and the plan for next month.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to sell fixed price websites anymore. You know the model. People pay you one time, you build a website, you hand it over, and the paying stops. If you keep selling websites that way, I don’t think you can support your life doing it. There’s a better way, and it’s not selling websites on subscription.
Fixed Price Websites Keep Getting Cheaper
I’ve been running a web agency for over 20 years. For the last eight, I’ve also personally mentored hundreds of web designers across the country and worked with thousands of local businesses. So I’ve had a lot of exposure to what people think websites should cost.
About seven years ago, I sat in a conference where someone was presenting to an auditorium full of online coaches. He told them not to bother building their own website. Just give somebody $5,000 and you’ll have an awesome website. That’s what everybody thought a website should cost back then.
Today I’m part of our Chamber of Commerce and I go to a bunch of meetup groups, so I talk to a ton of local business owners. When I ask what they think a website should cost, most people say $500 to $1,000. We went from $5,000, to $1,000, to just a few hundred dollars.
Why One-Time Website Pricing Doesn’t Work
When the price keeps dropping, you need more and more customers to make a living. That raises two problems. First, how do you find that many clients? Second, even if you did, what are you really selling?
If a business owner stops paying you, how are you supposed to keep helping them? A local business needs ongoing help with all of this:
- Driving traffic
- Converting that traffic into leads
- Nurturing those leads into clients
- Getting clients to keep coming back
If you’re just handing over a website, you’re pricing the production of websites. I don’t think that’s morally wrong. It used to work. But today you’ll have a hard time making money that way, and a hard time helping people too. The deeper you help people, the more you get paid. Getting a website is a small problem today, which is why it’s so inexpensive.
Nobody Likes to Buy Subscriptions
Moving to monthly payments brings its own problem. Business owners don’t like subscriptions. They can’t calculate what it’ll cost, because they don’t know when the payments will end. It feels like a permanent drain on their bank account, so they feel anxious about getting into that kind of relationship.
It doesn’t even matter how much the subscription costs. For a little over 12 years, I ran an ecommerce platform for WordPress that we sold on a subscription. It could be $1, and people still don’t want to buy it, because it feels like a subscription.
Selling Websites on Subscription Puts All the Risk on You
Here’s what I’ve seen web designers do. They want to make the $5,000 a website used to bring in. A good website still takes real effort. I don’t mean vibe coding a crappy AI site. I mean market research, copywriting, and messaging, which can easily take $4,000 or $5,000 of effort.
So they put all that work in during month one, then sell the website on a subscription. The client pays $200 a month for 24 months, and the designer makes $4,800. You’re basically letting the client finance the website on you.
I don’t think that’s fair. You carry all the risk upfront, and the client might not make all the payments. Contracts don’t solve it, because a contract makes the subscription even harder to sell. People do the math in their heads to figure out how long it’ll take to get out of it.
What Happens When a Client Stops Paying
I’ve tried to sell websites in just about every way there is, including on subscription. I was working with a client named Jordan who got into a bad car accident. He had to stop working for a few months to recover, so he told me he’d have to stop the payments.
What was I going to say? “Too bad, you’re on a subscription, brother”? I’m not going to say that. He was in the hospital and couldn’t take on business even if we sent it to him. So you put in all the risk upfront, and sometimes, through things nobody can control, the payments stop. The client was only risking $200 a month.
Websites Are Marketing Campaigns Now
What I’m suggesting is a change in how you think about websites. Websites aren’t things anymore. They’re marketing campaigns.
Think about ads. You can’t sell an ad campaign for a one-time payment. I run a lot of ads, for myself and for other people, and there’s a whole process to it:
- Run a few variations and do some A/B testing.
- Turn off the bad ads and boost the good ones.
- Replace ads as they fatigue, and try different campaigns and targeting.
- Send the traffic to a landing page with an offer and an opt-in.
- Nurture those leads with a drip campaign, and monitor the whole process.
Nobody sells that as a fixed price product. You work on it for a long time, and the client stops paying when they don’t want to run the ads anymore. Websites work the same way today. The production is inexpensive now, and the value isn’t in the production.
Tie Your Value to Growth, Not Website Production
If you take one thing from this, break away from being associated with the production of websites. Be associated with the growth that comes from your work.
When I talk to business owners at networking events, I don’t talk about how many pages they want or how ecommerce bumps up the price. I ask, “Could you take on more customers right now? Or are you usually fully booked?”
Some people are fully booked. They don’t have a demand-side problem, they have a supply-side problem. I just talked with a woman who runs a nutritional coaching business for college athletes. Her biggest problem is hiring more nutritionists, because she has people on a waiting list.
But most people at these networking events aren’t in that spot. Most feel only half booked and think they could at least double. Ask what becoming fully booked would do for their revenue, and they’ll say at least $100,000. So what do you want to be associated with? A couple hundred bucks for a website, or six-figure growth for a business?
No Contracts Overcome the Fear of Monthly Payments
So how do you get business owners past the fear of monthly payments? The first thing I tell people is that there are no contracts. You can start, stop, or pause anytime. If you have a cash flow problem, or, God forbid, you get in a car accident, you just stop.
I also think of clients as enrolling, because it’s a relationship. Our average agency client stays with us for almost four years, and some have stayed for over a decade. I’ve worked with a lot of medical professionals, and I worked with Dr. Baggesen for almost 15 years. He only stopped because his practice was acquired and he basically retired.
Pay a Chunk, Build a Chunk
The other big difference from selling websites on subscription: I don’t build everything upfront. I’m not going to build a $5,000 website and hope people pay for it over two years.
Our most popular package is our mid-tier one. It has a $2,000 setup fee and costs $875 per month. That’s $10,500 a year plus the setup, so about $12,000 in the first year. But the first payment is only $2,000, so I build $2,000 worth of the work. Pay a chunk, I build a chunk.
Why $2,000? Because that’s what it takes to build what I need to start. I research the client’s industry so I know how to write their copy, optimize their Google Business Profile, and know what to say on social media and in their emails. Then I use that knowledge to optimize their Google Business Profile, their website, and at least a little of their Facebook presence.
Start With Visibility, Then Lead Nurturing
From there, every month I put $875 worth of effort into promotion. We have three growth engines:
- Visibility
- Lead nurturing
- Customer loyalty, or getting customers to come back and buy again
In the beginning, almost all of my energy goes into visibility. Most of my clients don’t have much traffic when we start, so a lead magnet wouldn’t do anything. Nobody is showing up to opt in. So I work on traffic from Google Maps, organic search, AI search, and a little from Facebook.
A few months later, they’re showing up in the Map Pack and the traffic is climbing in their web stats. That’s when I’ll say, “Look at what we’ve done. I think we should redirect a portion of our energy into lead nurturing now.”
Hold a 15-Minute Lightning Meeting Every Month
Every month I do some work, run reports to see what happened because of it, and plan the next month. Then I meet with the client on a video call, like Zoom or Google Meet. I call these lightning meetings because they’re literally 15 minutes. If you say 15 minutes but go 45, nobody wants to show up after the first one.
Each lightning meeting covers:
- Here’s what we did last month.
- Here are the results so far.
- Here’s what I plan to do next.
- Are you cool with that?
They say yes, and I’m earning my keep every single month. That’s how I sell it, too. You’re not locked into a subscription. Every month I’ll show you what I did and the results, and tell you my plan. If you don’t want to do it, just say no and I’ll stop.
Set Expectations, Then Let Clients Stop Anytime
I do set one expectation. I need two or three months upfront to get the momentum going. We’re cranking up a flywheel, and that takes a little time.
After that, if it’s not working, or you don’t like it, or you have a cash flow problem, you can stop and start again later. You’re not on the hook. And I’m not losing anything either, because I didn’t spend $5,000 of time upfront hoping someone pays over the next two years.
So resist the urge to sell fixed price websites. Think of websites as campaigns. It’ll change the way you think about your entire business.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you charge monthly for web design?
Charge for ongoing marketing help, not for the website itself. I use a setup fee that covers the first chunk of work, then a monthly fee for promotion. Our most popular package is $2,000 to start and $875 per month, with no contract and a short monthly meeting to review results.
Should web designers sell websites on a subscription?
I don’t recommend it. Building a $5,000 website upfront and collecting $200 a month for two years puts all the risk on you. If the client stops paying, you’ve already done the work. Contracts make it worse, because they make the subscription even harder to sell.
Why are website prices going down?
Building a website has become a small problem. About seven years ago, people thought a good website cost $5,000. Today most local business owners I meet expect $500 to $1,000. When you price the production of websites, you need more and more clients just to make a living.
How do you get clients to agree to monthly payments for a website?
Remove the fear of being locked in. I tell clients there are no contracts, so they can start, stop, or pause anytime. I ask for two or three months to build momentum. Then every month I show what we did, the results, and the plan, and they decide whether to keep going.
Do web design clients need a contract?
In my agency, no. Contracts make monthly plans harder to sell, because people calculate how long it’ll take to get out. I charge a setup fee for the first chunk of work and build as clients pay, so I’m not carrying risk. Our average client still stays almost four years.
