What a website, bookings and client records actually cost

If you are collecting quotes, the question you are asking is "how much does a website cost". It is the wrong question, and you usually find out a year later.

A website on its own does not take bookings. It does not remember who came back three times. It does not tell you how many calls you missed on Tuesday while you were at the counter with another customer. The right question is what it costs to have the three things together, and what it costs to keep them running.

That calculation always breaks into three lines: what you pay once, what comes back every month and what somebody keeps on every booking. Nobody writes the third one into the quote, and it is almost always the most expensive.

First a calculation, yours

It takes a minute and a sheet of paper.

How many bookings reach you in a week through a portal? Say ten. How much does one of those people leave on average? Only you know that.

Now open the portal's contract and find the percentage it keeps. It is written in there. It is yours, and it changes from contract to contract: that is why I am not writing it in for you.

Multiply: ten, by the average bill, by that percentage, by fifty-two weeks.

That number is one line of your annual accounts. Nobody invoices it, it appears in no quote, and it grows on its own every time you work more. Write it in a corner of the sheet. We will come back to it at the end.

The calculation has three lines, not one

Whatever quote you receive, from whoever, it breaks into three lines.

One-off. The work done once: building the site, writing the copy, setting up the calendar, bringing in the client list you already have, teaching you to use it.

Recurring. What you keep running every month: domain, hosting, updates, security, support when something breaks, the licences of the tools that were put together.

Per use. The number you just wrote on the sheet. A share of every booking, a cost per message sent, a cost per contact in the list.

Almost nobody puts the third one in the quote, because it is not a number: it is a rule. And you cannot compare a rule to a price until you put your own volumes into it. That is why we started there.

What you pay once

A serious quote says which of these things it includes:

• the structure of the site and the pages your trade needs, not a filled-in template
• the copy and the photos, or who writes them and who takes them
• the domain and the mailboxes in your name
• the calendar set up around how you actually work: tables and covers if you cook, chairs and treatment durations if you run a salon, long appointments if you see people by consultation
• the client list you already have, brought in instead of starting from zero
• the hours in which somebody teaches you to use it

If a quote does not say which of these lines it covers, it is not a quote. It is a number.

What comes back every month

Here the risk is not the price of each line. It is the shape.

Three well-chosen but unconnected tools make three subscriptions, three invoices and three places to look. The customer who booked online is not the same one who filled in the form on the site, and neither of them is the one in the calendar. Three rows in three systems, and the one stitching them together by hand is you, in the evening.

An honest word about portals

A portal that takes bookings on your behalf does not send you an invoice. It keeps a share of the bill before it reaches you.

For some people it works, and that should be said: it brings people who did not know you, and in the first months of a new business those people are worth more than they cost. If you are in that phase, keep it.

The problem arrives later, when the same rule keeps applying to the customer who now comes for you and would have come back anyway. It is the only line of the calculation that grows exactly when you grow.

You can redo the calculation for your own trade in thirty seconds here: restaurants, hair and beauty, appointment-based shops, independent professionals.

What it costs with us

In full, because that is the part that usually goes missing.

The setup is the whole list above, done by us. After that the subscription is what is left, and nothing else: the third line does not exist. Zero commission on every booking, always, because the bookings arrive on your own site and the bill is entirely yours.

No minimum term: you leave whenever you want, you stay active until the end of the period you already paid for, and the customers stay yours.

Now pick the sheet back up. That number in the corner, the one nobody invoices: put it next to the subscription above. They are two different ways of paying for the same thing, and one of them you know in advance.

The detail of what is in each plan is on the pricing page.

Five questions for anyone who quotes you

These are not questions to make you suspicious of somebody. They are the five answers you should have in writing before signing, with us as with anyone else.

1. If one day I change supplier, what do I take with me? Is the domain in my name? Is the copy mine? Can the client list be exported?
2. Do the bookings arrive on my site or on yours?
3. If the same person books twice, does the system notice?
4. What is included in the subscription and what is billed separately?
5. How long is the commitment, and what happens the day I cancel?

Our answers, in writing, are in the terms of service and in the frequently asked questions.

The real calculation

If instead the problem is not what it costs but that nobody finds you, that is a different calculation, and we broke it down here: what actually decides whether people find you on Google.

The calculation this piece is about is not the price of the website. It is what it costs you, every month, not to have the three things connected: the booking that does not become a record, the record that does not become a follow-up, the follow-up that never goes out because that day there was work to do.

That appears in no quote, and you pay it anyway.