This page is the real playbook: every phase, milestone, and handoff written down so you can share it with your team before our first call.
Showing Blueprint bands and vendor accounts for Professional.
The six phases
Each phase below explains what happens, what we’ll need from you, and what you walk away with. Blueprint bands and vendor details update based on the tier you selected above. Every build, at every size, runs through the same six phases, including the fixed-fee Blueprint that produces your exact quote before any build work begins.
Reach out via email, phone, or our contact form. We'll respond promptly to set up your introductory consultation.
What happens
A short reply with two or three discovery-call time slots. No bots, no pre-qualification gauntlet.
From you
A sentence or two about why you're reaching out. That's genuinely it.
Duration
Same day – 1 business day
A free 30–45 minute call. Goals, pain points, current site, growth plans. No pressure, no upsells. All ideas welcome.
What happens
We listen. Then we recommend a tier and add-on combination that fits your goals and budget. Honestly. If TechTailors isn't the right fit, we'll say so.
From you
Whoever makes the decision should join. Bring your current site, examples of sites you admire, and any pain points or wishes.
Duration
30–45 minutes
A fixed-fee scoping engagement. We map your sitemap, scope, and integrations, audit your existing site if you have one, and hand you an exact build quote from our published rate card. For Professional sizes: $1,500 new, or $2,500 for a rebuild; 26 or more pages that carry a build fee runs $3,000 or $5,000.
What happens
You receive the Blueprint deliverable: sitemap, scope document, integration inventory, remediation audit, fixed build quote, and timeline. It’s yours to keep whether or not you proceed, and 100% of the fee credits toward your build fee when you sign within 60 days.
From you
Brand assets (logo, fonts, colors), your priority content, and your top three competitors' sites for reference. The checklist below covers all of this.
Duration
Confirmed at your discovery call
Design and development, hand-coded on Astro. Work begins once your Build SOW is signed and the first milestone payment clears.
What happens
We design your site’s look first, with two revision rounds included; your approval (or the 10-day review window) locks the design and triggers the next milestone. Then we hand-code the build: performance, accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA), SEO, and security headers designed in from the first commit. We provision your vendor accounts (Cloudflare, Cloudinary, etc.) and stand the site up on a staging URL. Milestones bill on your net balance as each stage completes.
From you
Final copy and imagery (for each page-type, a content sheet with one row per page), and a single point of contact who can approve revisions. Mid-build feedback is welcome; we share the staging URL the moment the homepage is testable.
Duration
Stated exactly in your Blueprint
Your website is ready. Before deployment, you sign a one-time, 12-month contract with a 30-day guarantee. Then we launch your site to Cloudflare's global edge network.
What happens
The DNS switch is timed for low-traffic hours. Go Live begins the moment you sign the agreement: we start preparing your launch, and your 30-day guarantee starts too. If anything is off in the first 30 days, you can exit the remaining 11 months of your 12-month contract with no further payment obligation. The guarantee is an exit clause, not a refund: past payments (the first month’s plan payment, plus Blueprint and build-fee amounts already earned) cover service and labor already rendered.
From you
Signed agreement, payment method on file, DNS access (or your registrar's contact).
Duration
Go-Live day – full DNS propagation usually within 24 hours
As your business evolves, easily expand with additional services: SEO, blogging, e-commerce, analytics, and more. Each add-on plugs straight into your existing build and starts billing when we begin setting it up.
What happens
SEO, blogging, search, multi-language, e-commerce, CRO, premium hosting. Each is a self-contained add-on with its own pricing. Add or remove any month-to-month after the initial 12 months. Add-ons never add a Blueprint or a build fee of their own, and the pages they need, like a blog’s on Blogging Starter and up, carry no build fee.
From you
Tell us when you're ready. We'll quote, scope, and ship.
Duration
Ongoing partnership
Growth reviews
Onboarding doesn’t end at launch. Every monthly plan includes a day-30 launch review, a day-90 growth review, and an annual review: a short presentation of your own numbers (traffic, rankings, form volume, blog and store activity) with at most one recommendation for what we’d do next. If the data doesn’t argue for anything new, we say so and get back to work.
You vs. us
Who brings what, agreed before we start.
Vendor accounts
Most of your stack lives in vendor accounts created in your name, not ours. You pay them directly. You can see every dollar. When you leave, we walk out; you stay.
Edge hosting on Workers, in an account that’s yours from day one. The plan follows your service level, not your page count.
$0: Smart Casual runs on Cloudflare’s Free plan.About $250/mo (roughly $200 on annual billing) for the Cloudflare Business plan behind the Professional security baseline, billed by Cloudflare to you.About $250/mo for Cloudflare Business; scopes that need Cloudflare’s BAA or enterprise controls move to an Enterprise conversation. The Premium Hosting add-on, on any plan, is our operations layer on top. It needs Cloudflare Business, so on Smart Casual it adds that plan; either way the Cloudflare plan stays yours.
We remove ourselves as Admin. No project transfer. No service interruption.
Your media layer: every image and video served from Cloudinary’s global CDN with automatic format and quality optimization, in your name.
$0 free tier: 25 monthly credits (a credit covers 1 GB of storage, 1 GB of bandwidth, or 1,000 transformations). Plus starts at $89/mo (billed yearly; $99 month-to-month) when usage outgrows it.
Already yours. We remove our admin access; originals download from the Media Library anytime.
Your content management system. It runs in your own Cloudflare account, with its database and media beside it: you own the account, the content and the data.
EmDash is free and open-source (MIT). Cloudflare’s Workers Paid plan, from $5/mo, is billed to your account.
Nothing to transfer: it’s already in your account. You get Admin, we disable our user, and EmDash keeps running with or without us.
The managed PostgreSQL database behind Blogging Pro’s EmDash. Cloud-hosted, in your name, with native pg_dump and one-click migration built in.
Pro, from $25/mo: the free tier pauses after a week without activity. Point-in-time recovery costs extra.
Already yours. We remove admin access and rotate keys; pg_dump or built-in migration to any Postgres host, anytime.
Your storefront engine. Headless, in your name, with zero transaction fees from us.
Core ($39/mo) up to Performance (custom). We map your E-Commerce add-on level (micro-store T0, Starter, or Pro) to the right plan during discovery.
Already yours. We rotate API tokens and remove admin access.
The engine behind the full Search add-on (Black Tie plans and above): fast, accurate, open source. The all-plan Pagefind option is static and needs no vendor account.
From ~$7/mo for the smallest cluster; small-catalog production clusters run ~$36–$60/mo, high-volume $200+.
Cluster transfer supported, or self-host open-source Typesense (GPLv3) in Docker.
Open-source product analytics with session recording, conversion funnels, and A/B testing built in. Your data, your account.
$0 up to 1M events/mo, which most sites fit inside. Usage-based past that; PostHog publishes a transparent calculator.
Stays yours, with full CSV/SQL export anytime. Open source, so you can self-host if you ever want to.
Enterprise-grade A/B testing, heatmaps, and session recordings, for when experiment volume outgrows PostHog’s built-in testing.
Growth starts around $314/mo at 10,000 monthly tracked users (billed annually) and scales with traffic up to custom Enterprise pricing.
Stays yours. Experiment data and reports export from the VWO dashboard.
Blueprint & build fee
Every new build, at every size. The discovery call stays free, and production work starts only under a signed agreement and a published fee.
A fixed scoping fee, two prices per size band: $500 or $1,000 (up to 10 billable pages), $1,500 or $2,500 (11–25 billable pages), $3,000 or $5,000 (26+ billable pages). The lower price is a new build; the higher applies when we rebuild an existing site (every rebuild includes an audit) or the scope has 3 or more integrations. Only pages that carry a build fee count toward the band, so an add-on’s pages never move you up one. You keep the deliverable either way, and 100% credits toward your build fee when you sign within 60 days; any credit the build fee can’t use comes off your plan invoices, starting with the first. That credit has no cash value: any still unused when your plan ends is forfeited. Every fee above is fixed: your SOW states it in writing before any payment is due. Most Smart Casual builds sit in the first band: $500 new, $1,000 rebuild. The fee follows your build’s size and condition, not your plan.Most Professional builds sit in the middle band: $1,500 new, $2,500 rebuild. The fee follows your build’s size and condition, not your plan.Most Black Tie builds sit in the top band: $3,000 new, $5,000 rebuild. The fee follows your build’s size and condition, not your plan.
Priced from our public rate card, not a quote call: $250 per page (each page-type’s overview page counts as one), $750 per page-typeA set of like pages filled from the same fields on one layout, one of nine kinds: services, conditions, service areas, offices, team profiles, projects, blog posts, products and legal policies., $250 per page past a page-type’s first 25, and $250 per standard integration; complex integrations, remediation, migration, copywriting and revision rounds past two run $175/hr, fixed in your Blueprint quote. Your legal pages are one page-type, $750 to build and one billable page a month, however many policies you need. On Professional and above, the privacy policy that comes with your security baseline is free: it isn’t part of that page-type and doesn’t count as a billable page. A blog’s pages carry no build fee on Blogging Starter and up, and a store’s carry none on any E-Commerce plan. Your sitemap page is free. Your Build SOW states the exact total; the total you sign is the price. Professional and Black Tie add a one-time security-baseline setup fee by the same bands as the Blueprint ($750 up to 10 billable pages, $1,000 for 11 to 25, $1,500 for 26 and up), half-waived with annual prepay. Smart Casual has no baseline and no setup fee.
A page-type’s $750 covers designing and building its layout, then publishing up to 25 pages from your content sheet: one row per page, with your final copy and photos. Each page past 25 is $250. We load every row, size every image, write each page’s search title, description and image alt text, link the pages together, and test each one. If your copy isn’t final, we can write it for you as a fixed line in your Blueprint quote. Nothing we write or polish goes live until you approve it: you’re the expert in your field, so the final say on every claim is yours, and so is the responsibility for it. Unique pages work differently. Bring outlines and we’ll polish them into final copy.
You never prepay the whole build. Net balances of $2,500 or less split 50/50 (signing / staging approval); larger builds run 40/30/30 or monthly progress billing, and each installment is earned as its stage completes. Annual prepay at signing (pay for 10 months, get 12) waives half the build fee before your Blueprint credit applies; if the credit is bigger than the halved fee, the rest comes off your plan invoices, starting with the first. Prepay halves the security-baseline setup too. That setup bills once beside the build, non-refundable once the configuration ships; move up to Professional or Black Tie at any plan change and it bills once at that point instead. Never twice. Smart Casual has no setup fee, so there is nothing extra to invoice.
Smart Casual example: a 5-page new build
Prepay the year at signing? The $1,250 halves first: $625 − $500 credit = $125 total. Smart Casual carries no security-baseline setup fee, so that is the whole one-time bill after the Blueprint.
Professional example: a 20-billable-page new build with 2 page-types and 2 integrations
Prepay the year? $6,500 halves to $3,250, minus the $1,500 credit = $1,750, split 50/50, and the setup halves to $500: $2,250 one-time after the Blueprint.
Black Tie example: a 100-page rebuild with heavy integration and remediation work
Prepay the year? $33,500 halves to $16,750, minus the $5,000 credit = $11,750, billed monthly, and the setup halves to $750.
Blueprint and milestone amounts pay for work already performed, so they’re non-refundable once earned, separate from the 30-day guarantee, which starts at Go Live and is an exit from the remaining 11 months of your plan, not a refund. Work pauses if an invoice runs more than 7 days past due. After launch, a new unique page or page-type carries the same one-time price as at launch. Pages you add to a page-type you already have are free up to its first 25; past 25, each one is $250 and bills at your plan’s page rate each month, just as at launch. Add-on services (Blogging, Search, Multi-Language, E-Commerce, CRO, or any other) never add a Blueprint or a build fee of their own, and the pages they need carry no build fee: a blog’s on Blogging Starter and up, a store’s on any E-Commerce plan. Posts and products on Blogging or E-Commerce Starter and up never bill per page.
FAQ
Full FAQ at /faqs.
See your exact monthly price, then talk to us when you’re ready.
Price Your Build30-day guarantee on every new plan: an exit, not a refund.