Website-as-a-Service (WaaS)
Monthly All-Inclusive Plan
An innovative way to build, manage and maintain your website.
Most of us pay monthly for our smartphone and cellular/data service. Buying the phone outright is a huge upfront expense.
Our "Website-as-a-Service" (WaaS) plan is like that.
In the same way, it provides you a premium website (not a cookie-cutter, template-based design) for a low monthly cost, with nothing upfront.
In addition, it's all-inclusive. Everything is taken care of.
No Up-Front payment;
predictability of costs
With traditional website development projects you pay 50% upfront and 50% when the website is launched. For a professionally designed and built site that means parting with $5,000 to $8,000 over the course of a month or so. With WaaS, there are no up-front costs, just a low monthly fee, and the same fee every month you use the service1.
Everything's included
With just a couple exceptions2, everything is taken care of (including all content and layout changes), allowing you to outsource everything website-related and focus on sales. See below for a complete list of what we mean by “everything”.
Always up-to-date
As your business grows and new sales programs are developed, the website keeps pace. You can make the changes you want, or you can ask us to make them. Anything that needs to be changed is included in the monthly fee.
Always secure
We set up advanced firewalls on both the server and application level, preventing 99.9% of attacks. In the rare chance your site is ever compromised we’ll fix it for free.
Search Optimized
We follow SEO best practices, and take care of optimizing your page titles, permalinks, internal linking, alt tags, headings, sitemaps, and more. It's the foundation of a proper SEO strategy, and sets you up for great results with an SEO campaign.
Scales with your business
Not only do you avoid a large spend upfront (when most need to hang on to your capital), but the cost scales as your business—and the size of your website—grows.
Blazing fast
Speed is a core value for us. We have the experience needed to be relentless in employing optimizations and without bloat, and our lightning quick, custom hosting stack takes care of the rest. This benefits your site's search engine ranking and your users.
Always in style
Website design standards change over time. With WaaS your website always looks great on every device. Rather than paying for a design refresh—usually close to the cost of the initial design—we can make updates anytime. It’s all included.
Designed to convert
We're motivated to make your website convert visitors into buyers, since we benefit when you grow. We're quite good at it too.
What is WaaS?
WaaS =
Design
+
Building
& testing
& testing
+
Management/
care plan
care plan
+
Dedicated staff to
handle all edits
handle all edits
+
Partner interested in the
long-term success of the project
long-term success of the project
+
Costs that scale with your business growth
+
Monthly payments rather than a huge upfront cost so you can
conserve your capital for other marketing activities
conserve your capital for other marketing activities
Core
Built with WordPress
Custom Designed
Mobile Responsive
All plugin licenses for core functionality
UNLIMITED Content and Layout Changes, anytime
Illustrations and Photos
Lead Capture Forms and CRM Integration
Website Analytics Dashboard
Blog
Optimizations for SEO
Optimized for Page Loading Speed
Copywriting
Infrastructure
Super fast Hosting
Automated Daily Backups
Latest Security
Server and Site Maintenance
Domain Name Registration and Renewal
SSL Security Certificate
Real-time Malware Detection
Optional Features
Interactive FAQs
Appointment booking calendars
Membership site
Product configurators and pricing calculators
Interactive dealer/store locator map
Image or video galleries
Embedded ratings and reviews
Social or email campaign landing pages
Event calendars
Help desk ticketing system
Multi-language site translation
Integrated online chat
Online Courses (E-learning)
Product RMA management system
Interactive hotspot images
Recurring subscription creation and management
E-Commerce
Custom-designed, High-Converting, Simplified Checkout
Subscriptions
Setup of your Stripe Account to Process Credit Cards
Wholesale and Tiered Pricing for Distributors
Abandoned Cart Recovery
Quote Requests
Custom Order Confirmation Page and Emails
Payment by Purchase Order
- Monthly cost scales as the number of active pages increases or decreases. Monthly fees are charged to your credit card on the first day of your monthly billing cycle.
- Custom programming and plugins required for certain features may not be included in the monthly fee.
- Applies to standard stock images. Custom photography or premium royalty-free stock photography from Getty Images, Stocksy and other premium image sites are not included and may be recommended, but remain optional.
Website-as-a-Service vs. Pay Upfront
Comparing payments over time for the same website
Pay Upfront (Traditional)
Website-as-a-Service
Pay upfront (traditional)
WaaS
COMPARE: | Pay Upfront (Traditional) | Website-as-a-Service |
|---|---|---|
| Summary | You pay for your website up front—typically 50% in advance and 50% at launch. Once it's completed, you have financial responsibility for hosting, maintenance, updates, security and anything else. When you want to add new pages, redesign a page, or overhaul the look and feel, you pay for that too. | You pay a monthly fee that covers design, development, hosting, maintenance, security and any changes to the site. Essentially, everything required to keep your site fresh and up-to-date. |
| Upfront cost (premium website) | $3K to $15K+ | Just the first monthly payment |
| Cost varies by number of pages? | Yes | Yes |
| Ongoing costs | Anything required or desired is an additional cost (hosting, backups, plugin licenses, layout changes, etc.) | Just the same monthly payment |
| Website hosting, maintenance, security, backups, anti-spam | $250 to $600 annually, plus additional labour as required. | All included. Daily backups. Weekly maintenance to keep site secure and running efficiently. Top-tier firewall and security plugins installed. |
| Content updates, layout changes, addition of new features | While you can make some changes with the WordPress CMS (Content Management System), some things like page navigation are tied tightly into the site structure and should be done by us. Plus, you don't really have the time to do changes. We typically charge by the hour. | All included (with certain exceptions)2. We'll add new pages1, re-arrange content, make whatever changes you want. |
| Troubleshooting, Fixing, restoring backups | It's not uncommon for websites to be hacked, or issues to arise from bugs in components used in the site design. Any labour and software needed to repair a broken site is billable at our hourly rate. | All included. We utilize the latest security techniques to prevent website attacks. But, if your website is ever compromised will will fix and restore your site at no additional cost. |
| Website refresh | Websites have a shelf life. Styles change and technology continues to improve. Most companies update their website constantly, with major facelifts every 1-1/2 to 2 years. | Because all changes to the site are included, your site will be continually updated as your company grows and evolves. |
Pricing
I'm IN CANADA
Premium website monthly price
$90
+
$12/PAGE
USD
$90/month plus $12/month per page.
No upfront costs (other than your first month's payment).
We take care of everything.2
Minimum 2-year commitment.
Premium eCommerce website monthly price
$190
+
$12/PAGE
USD
$190/month plus $12/month per page.
No upfront costs (other than your first month's payment). Product data entry, if required, is charged at an hourly rate.
We take care of everything.2
Minimum 2-year commitment.
Premium website monthly price
$120
+
$15/PAGE
CAD
$120/month plus $15/month per page.
No upfront costs (other than your first month's payment).
We take care of everything.2
Minimum 2-year commitment.
Premium eCommerce website monthly price
$250
+
$15/PAGE
CAD
$250/month plus $15/month per page.
No upfront costs (other than your first month's payment). Product data entry, if required, is charged at an hourly rate.
We take care of everything.2
Minimum 2-year commitment.
Do you need a high-converting website?
Is cashflow and cost predictability important to you?
Operators are standing by.
Details
General
- Professional, hand-crafted, CUSTOM design (NOT off-the-shelf template-based).
- Leveraging our years of digital marketing experience for a site experience users that achieves your customer's goals while also accomplishing your goals as a business owner.
- Full project management (status reports, communication, phone and video meetings).
- Development in WordPress and WooCommerce.
- Unlimited design revisions.
- Unlimited update or content change requests.
- Blog infrastructure (blog archive page counts as one page toward the page count, individual blog article pages do not) and a blog article template. Blog article content is not included—you can post new articles, provide us the content to post, or hire us to write blog articles.
- Technical support (5 days per week via email, text message or phone, weekend and holiday support via email or text message for emergencies or critical issues).
- Dedicated account representative.
- Detailed website visitor and traffic analytics dashboard.
- Contact and other lead generation forms.
Design
- Stock photos3.
- Photo manipulation and editing as needed.
- Mobile optimization (responsive design).
- Optimized HTML5 website structure.
- Content optimizations.
SEO & Conversion Optimization
- Submission to Google and Bing.
- Website speed optimizations.
- XML sitemaps.
- Title, link, meta optimizations.
- Keyword analytics optimizations.
- Social media sharing metadata and images for all pages and blog posts.
Security
- Monthly website review for plugin updates and publicly-disclosed vulnerabilities.
- DDOS protection via a ‘closed network’ platform allowing only humans at a normal rate.
- Web Application Firewall tuned for WordPress that blocks over 2M requests every 24 hours.
- SSL security certificate.
- Highly efficient real-time malware detection tuned for WordPress.
- Local and network brute force site hacking protection.
- Two-factor authentication if desired.
Cool Site Features
- Social Media
- Social logins
- Embedded Facebook, Google, Trustpilot, Amazon, Yelp, AirBnB, Booking.com and TripAdvisor reviews
- Instagram feeds, Twitter feeds, Facebook comments
- Social share buttons
- E-commerce
- Custom order confirmation page and emails
- Subscriptions
- Stripe payment gateway
- Abandoned cart recovery
- Custom, high-converting, simplified checkout page
- Pricing calculators
- eLearning
- Membership management, paid or otherwise
- Marketplaces
- Custom site owner dashboard with site analytics and helpful resources
- Charts and graphs for displaying data
- Custom branded login page
- Video embeds or galleries
- Interactive dealer locator maps
- Simple to complex forms of virtually any kind (custom programming, if required, is not included)
- Simple to complex tables
- Interactive FAQs
- Appointment booking calendars
- Lead capture integration with MailChimp or others (depending on the CRM, extra charges may apply although it’s rare)
- Affiliate marketing
- Many, many more…have a look at some sites we’ve done to get an idea of what we can do!
Standard Pages
These common pages don’t count toward the total pagecount for the purposes of determining the monthly price.
- Account pages: Login, register, forgot password, my account pages (all contribute a single page to count)
- Order pages: Cart, checkout, order confirmation pages (all contribute a single page to count)
- Individual blog posts (only the main blog archive page counts)
- Individual e-commerce product pages (only product archive or product catalog pages count, but all archive/catalog pages contribute to a single page count)
Technical
- Industry-leading Google Cloud Platform for future-proof infrastructure.
- Commercial Litespeed Enterprise web server specialized in WordPress caching and PHP processing.
- World’s fastest content delivery using Google Cloud CDN global network.
- Reliable, resilient, low-latency Google Cloud DNS serving from Google’s worldwide network.
- Server and website maintenance
- 5GB data storage
- 16 hr/day uptime monitoring
- Up to 10K visitors/month
- Custom domain name registration and renewals
- Unlimited subdomains
- Automated daily incremental backups, long-lived distributed backups & disaster backups.
- Robust security to prevent against hackers and malware
- Anti-spam filtering
- Image lazy-loading for increased page loading speed
- Page caching
- Image size optimization
FAQs on WaaS
No—just the first month’s payment. The cost of everything is included in the monthly rate. For example, if you want us to design, build and maintain a 5-page website, your monthly payment is $150, and you’ll pay that in advance.
A two year minimum commitment is required.
If you cancel prior to the two-year term expiration, then just like your cell phone plan, you’ll need to buy out the contract. In any case, we’ll provide you an archive of your website so that it can be installed on a different web server, and you’ll now be responsible for the cost of any premium plugins used, if you want to keep them.
Only if you want to add any features that aren’t included in the plan (above). The WaaS plan includes everything to design, build, launch, and maintain a modern, fast, SEO-friendly, future-proof website on the Internet. You’ll only pay your quoted monthly rate, which varies only by the number of pages that make up the site.
Custom development, custom integration with external systems, or functionality that requires a plugin costing more than $30/year. We’ll always try to find the most cost-effective solution, and even these do not necessarily require extra charges (but probably). Talk to us about what you have in mind.
This is a big point of differentiation between WaaS and sites built by other companies. You don’t need just a beautiful website, you need a professionally branded site that connects with your target audience and converts visitors into prospects and leads into sales.
We spearhead the copywriting of your website to ensure your unique value really shines and that you get the results you’re looking for.
Typically creating the website content is a collaborative effort, as you know your story better than anyone, and you likely have copy that’s been created in the past that makes a good starting point. But we're experts at simplifying your message and distilling the value you provide your customers so they "get it".
The monthly cost will increase as soon as we begin design of the new page and your next payment will reflect the new page. If you add any new pages during the last 6 months of the 2-year term, the term is extended by 3 months for every page added.
It's quite possible that we'll increase the price at some point, but your monthly per-page rate will stay the same for a minimum of two years.
Sure, we can do that.
- Initial website design and development for a custom, professional, corporate website depends on many things, but $3,000 to $5,000 for a 5-page website is typical.
- Stock images $40 to $250 each (one-time)
- Registrations and certificates – $10 to $100 annually
- Software plugins and themes – $200 to $600 annually
- Hosting, maintenance and security – $150 to $500 annually
- Content & design updates – $250 to $2,000 annually
We accept Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express for monthly plans. We also accept check or Interac e-transfer payments if you’re pre-paying for a whole year.
We limit the clients we take on per month to give your project the time and attention it deserves. It typically takes 3-4 weeks, including a full quality assurance review and testing on multiple devices and browsers.
We use Wordpress exclusively (as does 40% of the public Internet!). Other website platforms have their place, especially for solopreneurs and freelancers who want to develop their own websites (and have the marketing skills to develop a great looking and high-performing site), but for the clients that we generally work with Wordpress is a better option for several reasons (cost, flexibility, SEO performance are just 3 of them).
Our monthly pricing model allows us to manage our own infrastructure and software solutions. This keeps our reliance on third-parties to an absolute minimum and allows for a true end-to-end solution. You’ll never get a random bill from a company you didn’t know about (seriously, this happens a lot!) We'll try not to tell you “the problem isn’t on our end” and point the finger elsewhere (unless it absolutely, truly is!) We can address just about every issue within a single phone call or email.
All you need to do is book a phone or video call online so we can discuss your project and see if we're a good fit for each other. There's no charge for this initial consultation.
