Website-as-a-Service (WaaS)
Monthly All-Inclusive Plan
An innovative way to build, manage and maintain your website.
Just as most of us pay monthly for our smartphone and cellular/data service rather than buying the phone outright at a huge expense, Website-as-a-Service (WaaS) allows you to have a premium website for a low monthly cost, with nothing upfront.
Everything is taken care of. You don’t need to think about it.
No Up-Front payment;
predictability of costs
Everything's included
Always up-to-date
Always secure
Search Optimized
NIGHTLY BACKUPS
Blazing fast
Always in style
All This is Included
Core
Infrastructure
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.
- Advanced custom features, API programming, and custom videos are not 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.
- MailChimp and Salesforce.com integration is included, others can be added but may or may not involve a cost.
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 |
Cost varies by number of features? | Yes | No |
Ongoing costs | Anything required or desired is an additional cost (hosting, backups, domain registrations, security certificates, plugin licence renewals, 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 every 1-1/2 to 2 years. | Because all changes to the site are included, your site will usually be continually updated as your company grows and evolves. |
Pricing
Premium website
starting at
Premium eCommerce website
starting at
Details
General
- Professional, hand-crafted, CUSTOM design (NOT off-the-shelf template-based).
- Development in WordPress.
- Unlimited design revisions.
- Unlimited update 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.
- Contact and other lead generation forms.
- 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.
- Integrated site search.
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
- Basic affiliate marketing support
- Subscriptions
- Stripe payment gateway
- Custom product badges
- Wholesale and tiered pricing for distributors
- Request for quote rather than purchase
- Abandoned cart recovery
- Payment by purchase order
- PDF invoices and packing slips
- Custom, high-converting, simplified checkout page
- Pricing calculators
- 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)
- User activity logging
- 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 counts)
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
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.
It’s typically a collaborative effort. You know your story better than anyone. You also likely have copy that’s been created in the past that makes a good starting point. We’re happy to use it verbatim or we can refine it to ensure your unique value really shines.
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 $2,500 to $4,000 for a small, 6-10 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.
Many of our clients are based in the US or overseas, and are familiar with US currency (like us Canadians). But only Canadians understand Canadian dollars.
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.