You’re reading Signal vs. Noise, a publication about the web by 37signals since 1999.

This is the second time in two days that you guys have given designers/developers a good idea of real pricing. nice.

They have a very good portfolio, and they want to design Signal versus Noise. You may give them a chance:)

Although I’m shocked that people are still charging “by the page” in this day and age… A design (to me) should be able template driven so that the marginal cost per page is negligible. To me, the differentiators between the packages should be the complexity of the underlying services, none of this “5 pages/10 pages/30 pages” stuff.

So if you take the project turnaround as a guide number then it’s about 100 to 150 dollars a day. Some designers cost more than that per hour! So these dudes are cheap. I’m assuming the actual effort has to be at least a fifth to about a tenth of the turnaround to feed the ‘Developer’, ‘Project Manager’, ‘Thinker’ (whatever he does) and the ‘Designer’.

If I’m being honest, I’m not sure I agree. While it’s admirable that a prospective client should have a general idea of what a project will cost them, that doesn’t mean you should advertise your prices like Walmart. Waving a banner that say ”$5,000 for 10 of these, and $9,000 for 25 of those” cheapens the practice of web design. Our industry is a service, not a commodity.

I agree a client should know what a job will cost beforehand, but I don’t think this is the way to do it. Each job is at least slightly different, these differences can affect the price. Pricing by the job rather then lumping jobs into pricing gives you more flexibility to do the job right. Per job pricing can also be a better value for the customer, especially if pages are templated.

First of all, it’s pretty amazing to be featured in a post on SvN. Thanks for the love.

We’re thrilled you focused on the fact that we publish our pricing model. We’ve been building websites for years and have charged for our work in all sorts of ways. When we got together last year to start Design Vineyard (specializing in wine industry web design) we decided to just take a simple approach to everything. Every client wants to know two things… Can they do it? How much is it going to cost?

We got very tired of initial client meetings doing the dog and pony show, talking up our services, who we’ve worked with and then answering the always uncomfortable question of cost. So we came to the conclusion that why the hell not post prices and any other important details on our website? Every one of our clients has been very impressed with this, as hardly anyone in the industry posts prices. It was a different approach that we were willing to try, and I can’t begin to explain how much time and effort it saves us.

In a way, the pricing model has become a great filter for us. Potential clients are no longer surprised by cost, and most in fact have embraced it completely. We have had a surge of new business that I’d like to think is because we know what we’re doing, we’re good at what we do, and we’re reasonably priced. Along with our design, the pricing is something that makes us stand out. Web design doesn’t have to cost a fortune, and we really wanted to make it much more understandable and affordable for businesses. We can do this by making our design and development process much more efficient. Why not pass the cost savings on to the client? We see no downside.

This is not to say that we’ve come up with the perfect model, just one that works really well for us.

It’s no secret that 37signals both as a company selling a product and as a former agency is unapologetic about attaching a fixed price to an item. Our contention is that by listing the price first and the deliverables second, we’re in danger of putting the cart before the metaphorical horse.

Each client is different in not only their ability to pay but also in their needs. Does every client need a blog? Social media integration? E-commerce? How about sites that use just a few pages that have many moving parts rather than a lot of pages? By defining the scope before ever meeting the client, we’re failing in our obligation as web designers and developers. We’re reducing ourselves to, as Jay said, commodity sellers.

I fear the approach taken here actually violates a separate 37signals maxim: avoiding unnecessary features. (Alternatively formatted as Occam’s Razor, Build Less, feature checklist dysfunction, etc.)

Having a shrink-wrapped product with a price tag slapped on may be convenient for the agency and the potential client, but it’s almost certainly in neither’s best interest.

I have a feeling it’s gone over quite well.

Yes it has.

As for pricing model concerns. Sure, fixed pricing isn’t perfect. We may lose money on one project, but we more than make up for it one any number of other projects. We still try our hardest to do every project as best we can. Doing a project well, on time, at a reasonable cost, even if we lose money, makes for a very satisfied client. We’re more than okay with that because they have and will continue coming back to us for more work.

@JF You’re right, maybe it works for them. From the looks of it, Design Vineyard has carved out a niche for themselves with wine websites, where the variables from client-to-client are so limited that they’re able to put a static price on their work. And @Tyson, good on you for doing so. For the rest of us—and I’m assuming this is the majority—we’re working with such a varied client base that putting a price on our work simply isn’t sustainable. Every job is unique.

Should prospective clients have an understanding of what their website is going to cost? Absolutely. But answering that question isn’t always so simple.

@Jay, spot on. Focusing on a niche does allow us sustainable workflow. Most of those project are very similar, so we can work rapidly. Like all businesses should be doing, we are continually reinventing ourselves and trying to streamline everything we do.

Now, to be perfectly honest, not all of our projects fit into our tiered pricing, so every once and a while we have to put together a proposal that’s out of the ordinary. The reason the client chooses us over the next team is they just like our simple approach and transparency. They are happy to work with us because they already trust us.

@Dave! well maybe, but when you have to gather the information from a lazy client, it does make a difference. Sometimes they give you drafts, keep on changing the information they already gave you, keep on adding pages they didn’t think about from the beginning.

It might not make a difference if you are just adding pages from a Content Management System, but if you are gathering the information from an unorganized, lazy client it adds hours of work to the project.

That’s why I add a paragraph in my Website Development Contract about limiting visits to gather information and not providing me with drafts, but with the final copy. Anything else than that, it’s extra.

I agree that it is refreshing to see a design company do this, I like it! However, they need to make sure that their “Contact Us” page ALWAYS works… got this error:

“Profile Not Found”

http://www.designvineyard.com/contact.html

They could also implement a custom 404, since they list that as one of their services for all of their packages.

Thanks Ricardo! The contact form should be working… We use Wufoo, maybe it got locked up temporarily. We’ve already had a few people contact us today.

@Anonymous Coward, thanks, that’s something we’re working on ;) We recently added that to our list of services as a value add. Kind of a duh moment when we realized we didn’t even have one. We will be going through all our previous projects and adding custom 404s. We do think they are important.

What would also be good is a listing of the expectations on the client too…

@RS Fair points. When you put it like that, it’s hard to disagree.

In the past, I’d always give a wide ballpark range when someone would ask me “how much does a Web site cost” and tell them to give me more details before I could get a real quote to them. A lot of back-and-forth going on there. Since my company switched to “a la carte” package pricing, as I talk about on my blog, we’ve seen that people respond well to seeing clearly what they’d be getting for their money. It helps us to explain what we actually provide that can be of benefit to them without vague cost discussions getting in the way of the message.

@Tyson -

Does it really take 30-60 business days to deliver? That seems slow to me, but I don’t really know.

Does it really take 30-60 business days to deliver? That seems slow to me, but I don’t really know.

All the hallmarks of an internet comment.

1. Doubt. 2. Opinion. 3. Admitting you have no clue.

At least you admitted it.

@Dave!

I’m shocked that people are still charging “by the page” in this day and age…

You sir are absolutely right. You can’t tell by looking at the services page but part of our service is a CMS that allows our clients add pages (using an existing template) at will. In reality it is features such as e-commerce integration that make the packages different. We have a client with a “Basic” package that has a website with 62 pages.

To tell the truth the “number of pages” constraint is there more than anything else to give perspective clients a more tangible idea of what makes a small or large project. Not every “small” project has a small number of pages but in our experience there is a strong correlation.

@David Anderson

Does it really take 30-60 business days to deliver? That seems slow to me, but I don’t really know.

It doesn’t 30-60 business days to deliver a single project. There are however 2 factors to consider here:

1) We need to have many projects in the pipeline at once.

2) Clients.

@Joel

What would also be good is a listing of the expectations on the client too…

That is seriously the best idea I have heard this year.

This is an interesting page: It’s good because it provides potential customers with an idea about what they are expected to pay, but it assumes that the buyer already knows how many pages their website will have.

I believe agencies need to start charging for design ROI : page views, time on site, sign up rate, etc… (whenever applicable), rather than just the number of pages or added features. Pages and features are means to an end, which is successful customer acquisition. And design plays a major role in these numbers.

In some cases, a simple 5 page website can deliver more value than a 10 page complex one. And a client should pay more for someone who can reduce the website’s weight, while increasing its value to visitors.

I’ve been experimenting with this over the past few months, and I could already see the shift in clients perspective when the focus is on the results/value rather than screens and features. I should be able to share more thoughts on this soon :)

Thanks for sharing!

I’m in the process of reworking my own site, and I’ve added something similar to this (both package pricing and a la carte services).

I can’t speak for Design Vineyard, but I list prices to filter those who really want my services from those who are “just looking” (and with whom I would still have to meet, run numbers, write a proposal, etc.).

Plus, I had noticed that my proposals/quotes were beginning to settle around certain “nodes” of cost/service… listing the package prices was just a way of being straightforward about where the price would’ve likely been anyway (again, without all that extra “overhead” involved in quoting projects).

Going forward, I expect it to lower the overall number of inquiries I get, but raise the conversion rate (and create a base of trust) among those who do inquire. That’s just fine with me… it allows me to focus more on doing the actual work instead of biz admin.

What would also be good is a listing of the expectations on the client too…

We do this in our quotes. In addition to spelling out the broad strokes of what the client is getting, we also spell out their responsibilities (i.e. be available, respond to updates within a certain amount of time, have your content in order before we start, expect to spend x hours per week doing copy editing & updating, etc).

That way the client gets the whole picture up front. It’s working out fairly well so far.

We do this in our quotes

@Chris Hawkins – That’s a very good point. Just because prices are listed doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for an individualized plan (for both client and designer) that gives them context about their project.

The price (package) listing is more a starting point for the conversation… one which would-be clients can use to decide if they want to “talk back”, without requiring that time-consuming and super-generic first exchange about the basics.