What it costs,
before you ask.
Most studios make you sit through a call to hear a number. Here are mine. A website starts at $4,000; where it lands depends on how many pages there are and how much of the writing I do. Stores, portals and anything that reads from your data are scoped first and quoted from the scope.
Most sites
$5,000$8,000
Built, written and live on your own hosting. Yours outright once it is paid for.
What the work coversThe breakdown.
Pick where you start and add what you know you need. The number moves as you go. It is a floor rather than a quote — I will not price you properly without reading a brief — but it is the same arithmetic I would do on a call, and nothing is hidden inside it.
- What you are buying is professional design and development services, delivered remotely and quoted per engagement from a written scope. Nothing here is a physical product, a license or a subscription to software I host. What you receive is described under each engagement above, and it is what the agreement obliges me to deliver.
- Billing runs half on signature and half on launch, fourteen days to pay each. If the deposit is the thing in the way, a quarter down and six monthly instalments costs five per cent on the financed balance, stated in dollars on the invoice rather than as a rate; longer terms exist if you ask for one and cost more. You own the site once the build is paid for. A care plan, if you take one, bills separately at the start of each month and cancelling it never takes the site away. Invoices are in US dollars and payable on receipt; anything unpaid after thirty days pauses the work until it clears.
- The refund policy turns on kickoff. The deposit reserves a slot in the calendar and covers the discovery that starts immediately, so it is non-refundable once kickoff happens. Before kickoff, it is refunded in full. After that, fixed-price work can be halted at any milestone: you pay for what has shipped, you keep it, and any balance already paid against unstarted work is returned within ten business days. A care plan ends on thirty days’ notice, and the notice month is not refunded.
- What moves a price above the floor is scope, mostly: more pages, more flows, a store or a login, another language, another location. Regulated work costs more because the research and the documentation cost more. A rush timeline carries a premium, quoted in dollars before you agree to it, and I will usually talk you out of it. Anything outside the signed scope is quoted in writing and starts only once you approve it.
- You own the work, on final payment. The designs, the repository and the components transfer to you outright. I keep the right to show the work publicly unless the agreement says otherwise. Nothing is held hostage as leverage for a retainer.
- Taxes and disputes, the boring part: prices exclude any sales tax or VAT, which is added where the law requires it. Engagements are governed by the laws of the State of New York. If something goes wrong, write to me before you write to your bank. Every dispute I have had was a scope conversation nobody started early enough.
- You are contracting with Jacquelyn Meyer, an independent designer and developer working alone. Any question — billing, scope, refunds — reaches me at the inbox linked on this page.