“How much does a website cost?” is one of the most common questions a business owner asks, and one of the least honestly answered. The typical response is “it depends”, followed by a discovery process designed to work out how much you are willing to spend before anyone gives you a number.

This article does not do that. Here is what MM8 charges, why those numbers are published in the first place, and what actually moves them up or down.

What MM8 charges

Three engagements, each with a published starting figure.

Digital Presence, from $4,500. Strategy and structure, design and copy direction, WordPress development, and the search and measurement foundations. This is the engagement for a business whose problem is being found and being believed.

Presence and Operations, from $7,500. Everything above, plus lead response workflows, CRM and client onboarding, and practical automation. This is for a business where demand is arriving and leaking at the same time, so both halves get built together.

System Sprint, from $2,500. Process mapping, a prototype and implementation, team handoff, and thirty days of refinement. This is for one expensive bottleneck rather than a whole website.

Ongoing support is quoted separately against the actual work involved, because a business publishing weekly needs something different from a business that wants its site kept current and secure. There is no standard monthly fee here, and inventing one would only mean overcharging most people to keep the number simple.

Why these numbers are published at all

Most agencies do not publish prices. That is a real and easily checked pattern: look at the pricing page of the design and marketing firms in your own city and count how many state a number rather than inviting you to book a call.

We are deliberately not going to tell you what those firms charge. We have no audited figure for it, and an invented range dressed up as research is exactly the kind of claim this studio refuses to make, even when it would flatter us. If you want that comparison, the only reliable way to get it is to ask two or three of them for a quote on the same brief and see what comes back.

What we can explain is our own reasoning for publishing.

A published price does two useful things. It lets you disqualify us in thirty seconds if the number is wrong for your business, which saves you a call and saves us one. And it removes the part of the sales process where the quote quietly adjusts to what the room seems able to afford.

What actually moves the number

“From” is doing real work in those figures. Four things move a project above its starting point, and none of them is a surprise at invoice time, because they are settled in the first working session and written into the proposal.

Scope. A five page site and a twenty page site with service areas and a resource library are not the same job.

Integrations. A booking system, a supplier catalogue, or an existing CRM that has to keep working all add real hours.

Content readiness. A business with photographs of its own work, a clear service list, and reviews already gathered will cost less and finish faster than one starting from nothing. This is the single biggest swing factor and the one most within your control.

Operational complexity. Automating a two person operation is not automating a team of twelve with a dispatcher.

Where the AI part actually shows up

Our process runs on AI tooling for first draft code, layout and copy, which is why a build takes days rather than months and why the prices sit where they do.

That compression does not remove the skilled work. It concentrates it. Every decision that makes a site good is a human one: what to cut, what a customer in a hurry actually needs, and when the generated version is confidently wrong. The tooling collapsed the cost of production. It did not touch the cost of judgment, and any studio claiming otherwise is selling you the output of a machine nobody edited.

The honest consequence is that more of your budget goes into the parts of the work that need a person, and less into the organisational overhead of moving a project between departments.

How to compare any quote, including ours

Price only means something next to what you actually get, so the useful questions are not about the number.

Ask who owns the site, the domain, the hosting and the content when the relationship ends, and get the answer in writing. Ask whether you can edit your own pages without a change request. Ask what happens to your monthly fee if you stop, and whether you keep anything. Ask to see live sites they built, not mockups. And ask what specific problem each line item solves, because a line nobody can attach a problem to is a line you are paying for anyway.

We wrote those out in full in seven questions to ask a web design agency, and they are deliberately written to be used on us as well.

The short version

MM8 starts at $2,500 for a single system, $4,500 for a website engagement, and $7,500 when the website and the operations behind it get built together. What your project actually costs is settled after one working session, in writing, before anything begins.

The full breakdown of what each engagement includes is on the engagements page.