Pricing
Every price in the open. Nothing waits on a quote.
Where to start, what each piece costs, what the same work costs elsewhere, and how you pay for it — down to the schedule, the tax line and the terms.
Where are you starting?
Every answer here opens on a price.
Want the whole number? Add it up on one page — every line, with tax and the payment schedule.
The build
The website
A one-time fee to design and build it, in three sizes. Below is what each costs and how long it takes; the cards, the feature lists and what a build actually includes are on the websites page.
Website Audit · $375
A look at the site you have and the thing it's built on, delivered as a short written verdict: improve it, replace it, or leave it alone.
Credited in full against a build — or, if the verdict is to improve the site you have rather than replace it, against your first month on the plan that does that work. And if the answer is that your site is fine as it is, we will tell you that — being told so plainly is what you paid for.
Don't like the first design? Take your money back.
Read the guarantee in full — what it covers, the window it runs for, and where it stops.
Every build takes add-ons. See the add-on menu.
Every build can also be paid in up to 12 equal monthly installments at no extra cost — same price, different dates.
Beyond the build
Security, and buying our time
One of these you cannot buy separately any more, on purpose. The other is hiring us by the hour when something falls outside every plan.
There is no security plan to buy
There is no security plan to buy, and that is deliberate. Every site we build ships secured, and the plan you are already on is what keeps it that way — which is why the security climbs with the plan rather than sitting beside it on its own price list. If the site you're worried about is one we didn't build, we won't take it on where it stands: we don't put our name on a stack we can't maintain. Start with a Website Audit at $375 and we'll tell you honestly whether it's worth moving.
What that means in practice: every build ships secured, Care Plus keeps it that way as new flaws are announced, and Care Complete adds the incident runbook, the quarterly review of who can reach your site and a security section in the monthly report. The security climbs with the plan.
How we secure a site, and what we won’t take onOr just buy the hours
- On demand$125 per hour
- Priority access$500 a month
See how the hours work — what counts as support, what gets quoted first, and what happens to hours you don’t use.
Answer speeds
How fast we answer, and what that costs
Five things on this site promise to answer you, at different speeds and prices, and they are sold on different pages. Here they are together, which is the only way to tell whether you need a faster one than you already have.
| What you are on | How fast we answer | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| On demand — no plan | In the order it arrives, usually within the weekNo commitment either way. Fine for work that can wait a week. | $125 an hour |
| Care | Next business dayWeekdays. Care answers next business day; the work itself is scheduled when we reply. | $99 a month |
| Care Plus | Same business dayWeekdays. Care Plus answers same business day; the work itself is scheduled when we reply. | $199 a month |
| Care Complete | Same business dayWeekdays. Care Complete answers same business day; the work itself is scheduled when we reply. | $349 a month |
| Priority access | Two hours, 8am to 10pm, any dayEvenings and weekends too. We answer out of hours; whether we fix it out of hours depends on what broke. | $500 a month |
Why these numbers
What this work costs elsewhere
Both numbers, side by side. If one of the market figures has drifted, tell us — we’d rather fix the page than defend it.
A website, designed and built
Surveys of solo and freelance designers put the most common project band at $2,500–$4,999, with full studio builds running to $10k. Growth and Signature sit inside that band; Foundation sits under it.
Going rate$2,500–$10kHarbor Tree$1,900–$7,500Keeping it online, every month
Full-service maintenance plans in this market typically run $95–195 a month, with basic tiers from about $50 and premium ones past $400; the nearest local comparable starts at $150 with a pro tier at $400. Managed hosting on its own retails for $50–90 before anyone touches content. Care sits at the bottom of that range on purpose: it is plumbing, it is priced like plumbing, and we are not trying to make margin on it. Care Plus buys the same work on a same business day clock, with the security kept current.
Typical plan$95–195/moHarbor Tree$99/moPlugin licences, renewed every year
A site assembled from a theme and plugins runs on commercial licences, and they renew annually in your name. A page builder at $49 a year and a caching plugin at $59 a year are the floor for a single site — before a theme licence, an SEO plugin, or anything for forms and backups. There are none of these here, because there are no plugins: it is written in code, so there is nothing to license and nothing that stops working when a card expires.
Two plugins alone$108/yrHarbor Tree$0Care Plus — a page a quarter, plus the upkeep
Three plans, and each step is built from parts you can name rather than argued against a market band. Care Plus is $199 where Care is $99: that $100 is the same business day commitment, double the edit allowance, and the security your site shipped with kept current — patched the day a flaw is published, scanned every week, the firewall and the headers kept in step. We used to sell that as a plan of its own at about the same money, and almost nobody bought a second decision about a risk they did not believe they had. Care Complete is $349: the further $150 is the technical upkeep — schema, sitemaps, broken links, speed regressions — plus the monthly report, the quarterly conversion review, the written incident runbook and the quarterly access review. All of it happens on the site we host, which is why it needs no standing access to your Google listing or your directory accounts. The monthly edit allowance covers changes to pages you already have. A new or rewritten page is a separate piece of work and is quoted at the add-on rate — no plan includes one.
Harbor Tree$199/mo
Website-subscription companies routinely delete your site when you cancel, or hold the code for years. Mine is registered to you from day one.
The fine print
What every package promises
In plain language, and the same on every tier.
The price you're quoted is the price you pay.
We agree on one number before any work starts — no hidden extras, no surprise invoices later.
Packages are a starting point.
Different pages, a different scope? We'll adjust what's included — and the price — on a quick call.
Setup is billed half at kickoff, half at launch.
Or spread it across up to 12 equal monthly payments at no extra cost — just ask before we start.
Your website is yours from day one.
Your web address, the design, the code and all your content. Whenever you leave, you leave with all of it — no exception, nothing held back.
Don't like the first design? Take your money back.
Before we build anything, you get a decision rather than an invoice. We design first, and if the direction isn't right we'll use the revision rounds your quote includes to put it right. If it still isn't right, say so within 10 business days of the last design we show you, and we refund everything you have paid us toward the build, with no cancellation fee — less only any third-party cost we've already bought for you, like a domain or a licence, which is yours and already spent. It is the refund or the work, never both: take the money back and the design stays with us, unbuilt. Nothing is being held back from you — nothing was paid for. Approving a design ends the guarantee, and so does going quiet past that window, the same way it ends any other review.
Care and Care Plus bill monthly, with no lock-in.
Cancel any time with 30 days' notice, no term and no exit fee. After the first year we may raise the monthly by up to 4%, never without 60 days' written notice, and a prepaid year is locked at the rate you paid.
Maryland charges 3% sales tax on web and IT services.
It appears as its own line on every invoice rather than hidden inside the price.
Why a build fee and a monthly?
The build pays for making the thing — design, code, copy, launch. Care pays for keeping it alive: hosted, backed up, updated and watched. Web projects have a reputation for invoices that grow in the dark; ours is one fixed number up front and one flat number a month, both agreed before work starts.
Still not sure what yours comes to?
Add it up on one page — every line, with tax and the payment schedule — or ask us. The discovery call is free.
The whole list
Every price, on one screen
Every figure the studio publishes, on one screen. Each one links to the page that explains it. Maryland's 3% is what we quote, because Maryland is where we sell from and where our clients are. If your business is registered outside Maryland, tell us before we quote — what you owe is a question about your state as well as ours, and we would far rather settle it in the quote than discover it on an invoice.
| Websites | |
|---|---|
| Foundation | $1,900 |
| Growth | $4,500 |
| Signature | $7,500 |
| Add-ons, on any build | |
| Extra page | $225 per page |
| Copywriting | $449 one-time |
| Photo cleanup | $200 per 20 photos |
| Logo & brand refresh | $349 one-time |
| Film homepage | $875 one-time, then $125 per scene beyond the third |
| Online booking | $575 one-time |
| Deposits and payments | $595 one-time |
| Instant estimate | $645 one-time |
| Your site in Spanish | $395 one-time, then $45 per translated page |
| Careers page | $350 one-time |
| Link continuity | $750 one-time |
| Email deliverability | $295 one-time |
| Extra integration | $695 per integration |
| Catalogue block | $475 per 50 products |
| Keeping it running | |
| Care | $99 a month |
| Care Plus | $199 a month |
| Care Complete | $349 a month |
| Help outside a plan | |
| Support, on demand — billed by the quarter hour | $125 an hour |
| Priority access | $500 a month |
| Past the 5 hours Priority access includes | $115 an hour |
Start a project
Ready for a site that wins the job?
Tell us what you're working with. You'll get a plain-language reply — and if we're not the right fit, we'll say so and point you somewhere good.
Don't like the first design? Take your money back. What it covers
Want the number first? Build an estimate — a minute, and no email needed.
Not ready? Check your Google listing — free, about ten seconds.
Prefer email? contact@theharbortree.com
Tell us what you need
Three fields. Takes about thirty seconds.