The number on my invoice at ship is the last number you pay me. There is no monthly platform fee, no hosting subscription, no CMS seat you rent through the studio. The Site package is $2,000. Site+ starts at $3,000. When the invoice clears, the repo transfers to your GitHub organization and the Vercel project transfers to your team. The meter stops.
This is unusual. Most sites at this price point ship on a hosted builder. Squarespace, Wix, Framer, Webflow. The buyer pays a studio to configure the builder, then keeps paying the builder every month for as long as the site is up. The site is the studio's work product for a few weeks and the platform's tenant for the rest of its life.
I spent a decade working both sides of that trade. Director of Marketing and DTC Operations at VARA. VP of Operations at Boomtime before that. Over 100 sites shipped across those roles, in every major hosted builder and a few custom stacks. Year 3 is when the bill stops making sense.
What year 3 looks like on a rented site
The buyer opens the platform's billing page and the site now costs $40 or $80 or $200 a month, indexed up since launch. They want to move. On Framer or Webflow, moving means paying a new studio to rebuild the site from scratch, because there is no code export that lands as a functioning project. On Squarespace and Wix there is not even a clean rebuild path; the design was shaped by the template from day one, and the template does not exist off-platform.
I have watched that migration happen five or six times. It costs more than the original build, always. The second studio has to reverse-engineer decisions the first studio made inside a UI that did not preserve them. Year 3 is when the buyer learns that the site they thought they bought was rented.
What ABD ships
The site is a Next.js repo. On the day the invoice clears, the repo transfers to your GitHub organization. The Vercel project transfers to your team. You control who has access, including whether I do. If you want me on the repo for Care Plan edits or a later engagement, I stay. If you want me off, you remove me. The account is yours from the moment you own it.
The domain is yours, registered to your account, pointed at your Vercel project. Your hosting bill is paid to Vercel, at whatever tier fits your traffic, not paid to me. If a competitor offers to host the site next year, the site moves. If you want to leave Next.js entirely in year 5, the code is standard React; any developer can read it.
The Site+ Content editor add-on runs on Sanity. Sanity has a free tier that suits a single-shop marketing site's editors and asset volume without a bill. The dataset lives in your Sanity account, not mine.
The last invoice
The buyer I want is the buyer who wants to own what they pay for. That buyer reads the pricing page, notes there is no recurring line item, and understands the trade. The site costs more up front than a Squarespace subscription would in month one. It costs less than the Squarespace subscription in month twenty. It costs much less than a rebuild in year three.
The studios that ship on hosted platforms are optimizing for a project fee plus a referral commission the platform pays them. I am optimizing for the invoice to end.
