Transcription
These three websites were built for the exact same purpose, to help a business grow online. But one of them costs $500, one cost $5,000, and the last one cost $50,000. Now, at first glance, you might think, well, obviously $50,000 sites looks better. But the truth is, it's not just about how the site looks. It's about the client, the goal, and the process, and the value that the website delivers.
Now, in this video, I'll walk you through real examples of websites at each price point, and we'll break down who is the client, who are the designers, what tools do they use, and most importantly, what problem the website is actually solving. So, if you've ever wondered why some websites cost more than a car, and others barely more than dinner, this video is for you.
Let's start at the beginning with a $500 website. So, what do you get for around $500? So, here we've got profile on Fiverr. He does Wix website design and development. The basic plan starts for $80, but you can go into premium for $300. And actually, if you scroll all the way down into the portfolio and you click it, you actually see that the price range is between $400 to $600, which is actually how Fiverr work. They're upselling you a bunch of stuff. So, actually most people pay $500 for a website.
And let's check out some of these websites. So the first one is Levy Electric Scooter website and this is the website. So let's scroll through it and we can see the different sections. We can see how it looks. There's not much interactivity going on. Images is not great. The typography is not great. It looks a little bit templatey, which it probably is. Let's see what other websites we've got here. Let's move here and see. We've got this autoglass website. And we can see just from the image. I couldn't find the published link here. Uh, but it looks kind of like the same. The same sections. Uh, imagery is not amazing. The design also is not amazing. It's okay, but you've got text overlaying an image. It's you can see it's quite amateur-ish, I would say. Um, that being said, you know, if we go here at the top, he's got 589 almost all fivestar reviews. So I guess Hib is doing well. And by the way, the fact that he is doing $500 website doesn't necessarily mean that it's not profitable for him. Um, it just means that maybe he knows how to do it fast enough for it to be profitable.
And under the premium, let's see what we're getting. So, we're getting a functional website. We're getting 10 pages, responsive design, content upload, plugins, e-commerce functionality, 15 project, payment integration. So, actually there's quite a lot of things here going on. So, to be fair, this is a great offer for this price. You get something that works. It's mobile friendly and it looks okay.
But here's the reality behind these types of projects. The client is probably a small business or a friend of a friend or somebody just launching their first side hustle. They don't have a brand strategy. They don't have great copy, but most importantly, they don't have a budget. And honestly, they just need something online fast. So, what does the designer do, right? They grab a template, they swap the text, the images, they add a few colors, and that's it. It's done. So, it's less about solving a business problem. It's more about just checking the box. We have a website. It's not bad. It's just limited. There's no custom interaction, no deep content strategy, no conversion rate optimization thinking, and definitely nobody's asking how do we turn this into a sales machine. But that's totally okay because at this price, both the client and the designer know the deal. They're not trying to build the next apple.com. They're just trying to get something online without breaking the bank.
Okay, let's see what happens when the budget goes up to $5,000. All right, so this is the profile of Tokir, uh, which is a Web Flow developer. He's also a Flux Academy graduate. And you can see here from his Web Flow experts profile that his projects are starting at around $3,000, but probably most of them are around five or maybe even a little bit more. And we can actually click here to see some of his websites. And you can definitely immediately see the difference that we've got here. We've got 3D animations. We've got custom typography. We've got really nice animation. You can definitely see the design. Look at these nice custom interactions that we've got here. So immediately you see what a professional website looks like. Look at these interactions here. or the circle moving with the different features going on. So definitely you can see much more professional. Look at the the nice font and typography here. So this website looks really, really cool. And let's check out some of the other websites that we've got here. So this is um, see this is a portfolio for a brand and website studio. Also very nice seamless interaction and very nice typography, very nice image work. So, beautiful, beautiful work. You can see that $3,000 buys you something really, really nice here.
So, who's the typical client for this level? Well, usually it's either a small business or a startup, maybe like a creative professional launching their personal brand or growing a company, but they're ready to invest in their online presence. At $5,000, they're not just paying for design. They're getting a professional process, a brand story, of course, a unique and high-level design, but also content strategy, and a site that's really built to convert. Now, since Takir is using Web Flow as his tool of choice, they're also getting modern functionality like animation, smooth responsiveness, and a CMS that allows the client to update their content without calling a developer every other week. This is a huge jump from $500, but it's also where most freelancers want to be because at $5,000, the project is big enough to be meaningful and interesting, but it's also small enough to manage them solo.
Now, actually, a solo freelancer doesn't have to be stuck at $5,000. There's you can actually charge a lot more. So, here is the profile of Ethan. Now, Ethan is also a Web Flow developer, also a Flux graduate. And you can see that his projects are starting at $10,000. And actually, Ethan charges more than that. Last year, he charged, uh, he earned over $500,000 per year. So, you know, his projects are more than $10,000. And when you look at the actual projects, they're also amazing, just like Tokier. Perhaps you might even think, well, they they look at just the same quality, so how come he is charging double? And that's just because some freelancers really know how to build a brand and manage to charge more just because, you know, it's worth working with them or that's how they present themselves and they have more leverage and they create a great brand and something that people want to pay to work with. So even as a solo freelancer, you can reach very, very far.
Now to move from $500 to $5,000 or more, there's a few things a designer needs to do. Well, obviously they need to be good designers and master the tools that enable this kind of high-end websites, but also they need to learn how to communicate their value and not just deliver pages. And these kinds of websites, you know, they might help a business double their leads or improve their credibility or grow their revenue. And that's why $5,000 or $10,000 or $20,000 investment makes sense.
But what about a website that costs as much as a new car? Let's take a look at a $50,000 project now. At $50,000, now we're in the big league. Now this is Flow Ninja. They are a Web Flow enterprise partner studio that builds websites for companies like Upwork, 21 Shares, Checkout.com. Now note that these are big companies with big budgets. So at this stage, they're not just hiring a designer. You're hiring a team: strategists, copywriters, UX researchers, motion designers, developers, project managers. They're all working together for weeks, sometimes months to get every pixel and message aligned. And usually these projects are very big with lots of different pages. Um, there's multiple rounds of iteration, there's performance optimizations, there's custom interactions, accessibility audits, integrations with tools like HubSpot or Segment or analytics dashboards. So at this level, the website is part of a larger system. It supports sales funnels. It builds trust with enterprise buyers. And sometimes it's even used to raise millions in funding.
Now the client here isn't asking, "Can you make it look nice, right?" They're asking, "Can this website help us make or save money?" And that's a completely different conversation. One of the case studies on their website for a client called 21 Shares explains how by migrating to Web Flow, it helped the company to actually use less developers to maintain and update their website. And that saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars just in salaries saved by doing this project. So this makes a $50,000 investment a no-brainer. So $50,000 might seem crazy until you realize that just one single enterprise deal could pay for the whole thing twice, right? So this isn't about the budget, it's about the value. And when the stakes are high, companies invest accordingly.
Now, the crazy thing about um, Flow Ninja is that it was started by Uros, who is just 26 years old. So that means that you don't have to take years to get to this level of an amazing agency doing $50,000. If you know what you're doing, you can get there pretty fast.
So here's the truth. These aren't just different websites. They're different projects for different clients with different goals. And it's not just about how the website looks. It's about the strategy, the team, and the goal behind this and the stakes that are involved. Right? If you're a designer and you want to start charging more, in Flux Academy, we teach you how to move up the ladder with every project. So, make sure to check the next video and our full programs below, and I'll see you on the next one. Cheers.