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SOFTWARE CONSULTING
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Pricing

What it costs, before you have to ask

Most agencies make you sit through a call just to hear a number. Here are the ranges up front so you can decide whether this is worth a conversation. Every project gets a fixed written quote before any work starts.

Audit & Roadmap

$1,500 – $3,500

1 – 2 weeks

You think the site is underperforming and want proof and a plan before committing to a build.

  • ·Technical, content, and conversion audit
  • ·Analytics and tracking accuracy review
  • ·Competitive positioning read
  • ·Ranked roadmap with expected impact
  • ·Ninety-minute walkthrough of what we found
  • ·Credited against a build if you move forward
Most common

Website Build

$8,000 – $25,000

4 – 8 weeks

You need a site that actually brings in work, built right and owned outright.

  • ·Everything in Audit & Roadmap
  • ·Messaging and page structure
  • ·Custom design system, no templates
  • ·Hand-built responsive front end
  • ·Technical SEO foundation and schema
  • ·GA4 and Google Ads conversion tracking
  • ·Repository, pipeline, and documentation handover
  • ·Thirty days of post-launch support

Growth Retainer

$1000 – $5,000 / month

3 month minimum

The foundation is solid and you want someone on the hook for compounding it month over month.

  • ·SEO and content execution
  • ·Google Ads management, flat fee, never a cut of spend
  • ·Conversion testing and funnel work
  • ·Ongoing development and new pages
  • ·Monthly reporting in leads and revenue
  • ·Direct line to the people doing the work

Custom Software

From $20,000

Scoped per project

You have an internal process costly enough that building software for it beats living with it.

  • ·Process discovery and cost-of-current-state analysis
  • ·Architecture and written scope with trade-offs
  • ·Application build with auth and permissions
  • ·Integrations with your existing systems
  • ·Automated tests on business-critical logic
  • ·Deployment, monitoring, and handover

Ranges reflect scope, not quality tiers. Every project gets the same standard of work.

You get a fixed written quote before anything starts. No hourly billing against an open-ended estimate.

Ad spend is separate and goes straight to Google. We never mark it up or route it through Elias.

You own everything we produce, repository included, from the first commit on.

The economics

How that compares to the other ways to get this done

The ranges above only mean something next to the alternatives. These are the four options a business actually weighs, and what each one tends to cost before anyone talks about ongoing marketing.

Do it yourself

$0–$2k

A website builder subscription, a template, and your own evenings.

Cheapest possible outlay

Looks like every other site on the same template

Eats the hours you'd rather spend selling

Usually no conversion tracking at all

The cheapest freelancer you can find

$2k–$6k

A low quote up front, with most of the risk waiting for you after launch.

Low up-front cost

Quality is all over the map and hard to judge up front

Measurement is often skipped entirely

Support can disappear when you need a change

Full-service agency

$20k–$60k

Project fee plus a retainer, often with a percentage of ad spend on top.

Deep bench if the program is genuinely huge

Layers between you and whoever writes the code

Percentage-of-spend pricing is common

Overhead you fund whether or not you use it

Elias Software Consulting

$8k–$25k

A fixed written quote before anything starts. No hourly meter, no open estimate.

Senior work on the build, the SEO, and the tracking

You talk directly to the person building it

You own the code, the hosting, and every account

Focused capacity, so timelines depend on availability

These are typical US market ranges for building a business website, not quotes. Agency and freelance costs swing wildly by size, city, and scope, and ongoing marketing is priced separately in every column. Your numbers will land somewhere of their own, and we're glad to work through them with you.

Questions

What people ask about cost

Because you should be able to tell whether this is in your range without giving up an hour on a call to find out. Hiding the number mostly protects the seller. If these ranges are more than you want to spend, that's worth knowing now, for both of us.

Scope, almost entirely. How many pages, how much copy has to be written from scratch, whether anything needs to talk to another system, and how many rounds of review you want. An eight-page site with content ready to go sits near the bottom. Thirty pages with new copy, custom illustration, and a booking integration sits near the top. We walk you through all of it before quoting, so nothing in the number catches you off guard.

Yes, and sometimes that's the right call. If you mainly need an online business card, you don't need this. What you're paying for here is senior work done fast: the build, the search foundation, and the conversion tracking all handled by the same person, with no bloat and no hourly meter running. If that's not what the job calls for, we'll tell you.

Audits run roughly $1,500 to $3,500. Website builds typically land between $8,000 and $25,000 depending on page count and complexity. Ongoing growth retainers start around $2,500 a month. Custom software is scoped individually and generally starts around $20,000. You get a fixed written quote before any work begins.

Often yes, and it's frequently the better deal. Plenty of sites are built on solid ground and held back by a handful of fixable things: slow loading, fuzzy messaging, broken tracking, or a form nobody finishes. The audit tells us whether fixing what you have beats starting over. Sometimes it does.

Projects run on milestones: a deposit to start, payments at agreed checkpoints, and the balance at launch. Retainers bill monthly up front and you can cancel with thirty days' notice once the initial term is up. Ad spend goes straight from you to Google, never marked up, never routed through us.

All of it, from the first commit. The repository is yours, the hosting is in your name, and the documentation is written assuming someone else might take it over someday. We don't build on proprietary platforms that make leaving expensive. If the only thing keeping you here is how painful it'd be to go, that's not a partnership worth having.

Want a real number for your project?

Tell us what you're trying to build and we'll tell you roughly where it lands, plus whether there's a cheaper way to get the same result.

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