from · CHF
The price of a website
Most workshops do not publish their prices; this one publishes its floors. Here are the two amounts every quote starts from, what they include, examples of what pushes them up, and the money questions we get, with their answers.
- Building a site
- from 2 500 CHF
- Upkeep and monitoring
- from 1 000 CHF per year
What that figure already covers
- Design and writing: structure, words, layout. The words come before the mock-up, never the reverse.
- Pages that open in a fraction of a second, including on a phone at the edge of coverage.
- No trackers, no ad network, no typeface loaded from a third party: so there is no consent banner to dismiss.
- A legal notice and a privacy page written for your site, rather than a template that always describes somebody else’s.
- Going live, and the domain, the content and the code standing in your name: leaving requires nobody’s permission, and costs nothing.
What pushes the quote up
- The number of pages, and the number of entries when there is a catalogue.
- The number of languages: a version is written, not run through a machine.
- Anything beyond a page you simply read: booking, online sales, a customer area.
- The state of what you already have: copy to write, photographs to take, an existing site to take over.
Upkeep is priced by the year, never by the month: what you pay for is dated actions spread across twelve months. Backups, updates, certificates, watching for pages that stop answering, and repair within the response time agreed. It is priced into the very first quote, never discovered on an invoice in year two.
These are floor prices, not flat fees. A firm quote follows a conversation, because it depends on what you already have and what has to be taken over. Once signed, it does not move.
Amounts exclude VAT. Swiss value added tax at 8.1 % is added for clients domiciled in Switzerland. For clients domiciled abroad, the service is deemed to be supplied abroad within the meaning of art. 8 para. 1 LTVA and the invoice is issued without VAT.
Three situations, to place yourself
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A presentation site of five to eight pages, with texts you supply and we typeset: it starts at the creation floor and does not stray far from it.
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The same site with a second, properly written language, appointment booking or a supplied gallery: it exceeds the floor, because every addition has to be built and then maintained.
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A catalogue of dozens of entries, content to be written from scratch or a complicated takeover of an existing site: the quote is built line by line, and the preliminary conversation is all the more useful.
These examples give bearings, they do not price your case: the firm quote follows a conversation, and once signed, it does not move.
The money questions we get
- Why floor prices rather than a price list?
- Because a published price is an offer, and an offer corrected at quoting time destroys trust. The floors state the only thing that is true for everyone: no site is billed for less. The rest depends on what your site has to do, and that is priced in a written quote.
- Can the quote move along the way?
- No. The firm quote follows a conversation, precisely so that everything is counted beforehand. Once signed, it does not move: anything extra becomes a new written agreement, never a surprise on the invoice.
- Why is upkeep quoted per year and not per month?
- Because what you pay for is dated actions spread across twelve months: backups, updates, certificates, monitoring, repair within the agreed response time. A monthly figure would suggest a continuous service subscription, which this is not.
- What happens if I stop the maintenance?
- The site remains yours and stays online with your host: leaving costs nothing. Simply, nobody does the work any more: backups stop, updates too, and breakages are discovered when a visitor runs into them. The maintenance page details what each action covers.
- Are there costs you do not bill but I will pay anyway?
- Yes, two, and better to know them upfront: the domain name and the hosting are paid to their providers, in your name. They remain your property, one of the house rules, and they amount to a few dozen francs a year.
Towards an actual figure
The shortest path to a quote is saying what your site has to do: the three design tools take care of that in a few minutes, and an email does the job just as well.