There are literally thousands of options to get your business on the world wide web. We’ve had partners with $10 Wix sites, $10,000 Droopal sites and everything in between. It truly doesn’t matter how much you spend to get online but with so much cost variation it could be helpful to consider the true costs behind your website. 

A business website has three points of economics: launch, ongoing and conversions. 

Launch

To get a website into the web stratosphere it requires some amount of money and time. If you use a DIY builder like Wix, you are sort of getting this piece for free and skipping to the ongoing category. If you use a development company and get many design variations and custom programming to integrate with membership management software or other pre-existing tech you are going to spend more. According to a national survey of our partners, the average business owner spends $2000 to launch their website. 

 

Ongoing

In this category you have hosting which is ultimately some air conditioned server room (likely owned by Amazon or Google) that someone leases and resells to you. Wix’s entire model is to give you a DIY builder and then only charge you a monthly fee. With better hosting your site will load faster and this improves things like user experience (how many people will wait even 5 seconds for a site to load) which can lead to more members.

 

Conversions

This is the ultimate hope of any business website but not one that most account for. When you invest in the launch and ongoing upkeep of a website the [unspoken] goal is that the investment has a positive return. We imagine people see the website and feel validated that our business is worth trying or they’ll see our offerings and be convinced we are the provider they are looking for. This is where we have found a disproportionate relationship with most websites on the market. Not every one actually has a positive return. Most actually have a negative return and some have disproportionately positive return. 

 

Let’s consider our Baam websites. We guarantee a positive return each month so if your website doesn’t actually turn into a paying customer (or five paying customers) you could pay nothing. That’s no hosting, no launch, nada.

You’re probably thinking, “That’s too good to be true” but our job is to make you money and we believe it should be more common that those who don’t do their job don’t get paid.