One architect across the whole stack

What usually goes wrong🔗

A website is rarely one job. It needs a front end, a content model that a non-technical person can work in every day, an analytics and consent layer that is legally correct, a data layer that puts real figures on the page, and infrastructure that keeps it running.

Split across suppliers, each handoff becomes yours to manage. Three failures are close to universal: the content model is shaped around the developer rather than the editorial process, so publishing stays painful. The analytics were added after launch, so they measure what was easy to instrument rather than what the business needs. And the live figures on the page are typed in by hand, because the integration belonged to nobody.

Bought from a single agency, the failure mode inverts: a template rather than a fit, a platform you rent indefinitely, and a retainer to change your own copy.

One arrangement leaves you coordinating suppliers. The other leaves you renting your own website.

These are not six services to buy separately. They are why there is no coordination cost.

Proof🔗

Sunset Fitness: Shopify as an operations backbone🔗

A demonstrator built end to end against a real store. Passes sold as service products, member entitlement held on customer metafields, a QR kiosk that resolves access live, unlocks a door and writes the check-in back to the customer record, subscriptions, and B2B equipment sold off-storefront as draft orders. Multi-site.

The subject is not the gym. It is that commerce, physical access control and entitlement logic were specified, built and handed over as one piece of work.

Atelier des Bleus Pastel: a bilingual campaign site the client runs herself🔗

Two editorial versions, fifteen blocks the client edits without a developer, live campaign figures read from an API, consent-gated analytics, and structured data so AI assistants describe it correctly. Built to a fixed public date. Read the case study.

What I find in thirty minutes, before the first call🔗

Before a recent scaleup engagement, a review of the public site alone found: a home page weighing 5.9 MB, of which 1.4 MB was a single image; the GSAP animation library loaded twice, at two different versions, on every page including those with no animation; and a hard-coded exchange rate carrying a TODO comment, on a page that already called the live rate endpoint.

No access, no credentials, no discovery workshop. Reading a site before quoting on it is the difference between a proposal and a guess.

What the current arrangement actually costs🔗

Website costs are usually quoted as a subscription, and the subscription is the smallest part of the bill. On a recent six-language marketing site, the analysis broke down like this.

The published price is not the price🔗

Localisation is billed per language, per month. Six languages means five secondary ones, and the incumbent platform charges for each. Past a certain page weight and traffic, bandwidth allowances are consumed and the plan changes tier. Beyond that, enterprise pricing is not published at all, so the figure on the website is a floor rather than a quote.

That is visible to the client and invisible to anyone outside, which is exactly why it never appears in a comparison.

The agency retainer sits on top, permanently🔗

The subscription buys the platform. It does not buy a change to the site. Every new page, every campaign landing page, every additional language is billed by whoever maintains it, and that arrangement does not end, because it was never designed to.

The recurring cost is not the licence. It is the fact that changing your own website requires buying someone's time.

What replaces it🔗

The build is handed to your own engineering team. Conventional foundations they already know, in a repository they own, with a seventh language as one line of configuration rather than a quote. Marketing publishes without queueing behind engineering, and engineering changes the site without queueing behind an agency.

Hosting and subscriptions stay in your name, at ordinary published rates, because a provider who owns your hosting owns you. The fixed price below is the last invoice, not the first of a series.

Who you actually get🔗

Two people. One technical, one marketing. You work with both.

No account manager, no junior, no subcontractor. That is what keeps the fixed prices above achievable, and it is also the limit: this practice runs few projects at a time.