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
Everything's included
Always up-to-date
Always secure
Search Optimized
Scales with your business
Blazing fast
Always in style
Designed to convert
What is WaaS?
& testing
care plan
handle all edits
long-term success of the project
conserve your capital for other marketing activities
Core
Infrastructure
Optional Features
E-Commerce
- 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
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
Premium website monthly price
Premium eCommerce website monthly price
Premium website monthly price
Premium eCommerce website monthly price
What is a "page"?
For the purposes of counting the pages which contribute to the monthly price, a "page" is any unique layout that a website visitor could see. Often many pages share the same layout, which just different content swapped in (good examples are blog article pages or e-commerce product pages). All pages sharing the same layout contribute only one page to the count. For example, a website with a Home page, "About Us" page, "Services" page, "Contact Us" page, and a blog would count as a 6-page site: Home (1) + About Us (1) + Services (1) + Contact Us (1) + Blog Archive (1) + all blog articles (1) = 6.
Do you need a high-converting website?
Is cashflow and cost predictability important to you?
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.
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
- 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)
Security
- Full-time, enterprise-grade, website application firewall.
- Protects against SQL injection, malicious file upload, cross-site scripting and directory traversal.
- Real-time malware protection by Imunify360.
- Monthly website review for plugin updates and publicly-disclosed vulnerabilities.
- SSL security certificate.
- Virus/malware scanning.
- Local and network brute force protection.
Technical
- Top-tier hosting provided by Rocket.net.
- Hosted from any of 15 edge hosting locations throughout North America, Europe, Asia or Australia.
- Fast content delivery to users anywhere in the world via Cloudflare® Enterprise content delivery network with over 250 server locations around the world.
- Reliable, resilient, low-latency Cloudflare® DNS serving from Google’s worldwide network.
- Server and website maintenance included.
- 5GB data storage.
- 16 hr/day uptime monitoring.
- Up to 10K visitors/month.
- Custom domain name registration and renewals.
- Automated daily incremental backups.
- Robust security to prevent against hackers and malware.
- Anti-spam filtering.
- Image, video and iFrame lazy-loading for increased page loading speed.
- Web traffic dashboard.
- Full-page caching.
- Image size optimization.
FAQs on WaaS
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.
- 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. E-commerce sites generally take longer, so figure 6-8 weeks.
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.