What you own
This is the part most web shops will not do, and it is the whole reason this product exists. If you have been burned before, read this page first.
The arrangement, in plain words
- The site lives on your hosting account. Not ours. We build into an account that is in your name, which you can log into without asking us.
- The domain is yours. Registered to you. If you already own one, we use it. We do not register it “on your behalf” and hold it.
- Hosting at this size costs nothing. A small-business site fits inside the free tier of the host we use. You are not paying rent for the page to exist.
- If you leave, you keep all of it. No migration fee, no exported zip that does not work, no call to get your own domain released. You stop paying for the monthly work and the site keeps serving.
- It has to survive us. If this studio went away tomorrow your site would stay up and you would still control it. We think that is the minimum honest arrangement, not a feature.
What you are paying for, then
The build, and the monthly work. Not access to your own website. If you ever feel like you are paying us for permission to keep your page online, we have done this wrong.
Why it is set up this way
The usual arrangement — agency owns the hosting, agency owns the domain, site disappears when you stop paying — works well for the agency and badly for you. It also makes leaving so painful that nobody leaves, which means nobody has to keep earning it. We would rather keep earning it.
What we ask of you
One thing: you create the hosting account yourself, in your name, and invite us to it. It takes a few minutes and we walk you through it on a call. We verify the invite came through rather than taking anyone’s word for it — including our own.
Questions about any of this?
Ask before you commit to anything. If an answer here is not clear enough, that is our problem to fix.