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What is your website pricing approach?

Ulanji takes a relatively unique approach to pricing a website development project. We put it in the hands of the client. Our pricing scheme is transparent in the sense that we share our pricing tools with the client. The pricing variables are: design, functionality and service level.

Design costs are directly related to how much time a designer has to stare at a blank screen. In other words, the more specific the guidance, the less the cost.

Functionality concerns both how much interactivity is required between the site and its visitors and how much is needed for the client to manage his content. Our N-jine is broken down into modules, each of which either allows the client to control different facets of the site (i.e. publish news articles) or allows the visitor to perform certain operations (i.e. buy online).

Finally, Ulanji offers a variety of services from content creation to website marketing. Our clients pick and choose from these services, typically using their time/money equation as the determinant. For instance, a small business with a very small budget may elect to commit the time to content development and input in order to keep costs to a minimum. A client with a larger budget, on the other hand, may opt for us to provide that service in order to speed the overall development process.

Key to this pricing approach is our willingness to allow the client to participate in the cost/quote process itself. Afterall, our goal is to develop a long term relationship with each of our clients.



Why is there no consistency to website quotes from vendor to vendor?

This is still a new industry with few standards of any kind. It is also an industry that lends itself to freelancing. There are many "virtual" web development firms out there. What you think is a real business is just a marketing or sales guy who hires freelancers to do the work. No overhead. High volume. Low prices. Even lower customer satisfaction rates.

At the other end of the spectrum are those companies that were created to service large companies with big budgets, that find themselves chasing small companies with small budgets. They can produce some excellent work, if you can get past the sticker shock.

Ulanji is somewhere in the middle. We are a company of some 9 staff members working full time - programmers, designers, production staff, sales and support. We have an overhead, so we can't give away the work. On the other hand, we're set up to handle small to mid-size projects and our pricing reflects that.



How do you price a website project?

We handle projects of all sizes. The only thing they have in common is that in all cases there are two fees involved. The development fee is a one time expense, typically payable in three installments. The second fee is the subscription fee (see What’s included in the monthly fees?). Development fees are determined by the scope of the project – design time required, breadth and depth of the content, number of functionality modules that need to be set up and project management time required. We turn no serious client away.



What’s included in your monthly fees?

Our monthly fees (subscription fees) include hosting, functionality use, administrator support and training. The only variable cost involves the functionality modules you subscribe to. The other components of the subscription fee are static.



Is it true in web development that you get what you pay for?

Yes and no. There is a point of diminishing returns. The most expensive elements in the web development business are tasks performed by people with the rarest skills. Good database programming, for instance, is much more expensive than HTML coding. Flash designers command a premium over regular web designers.

The question then is what do you need? With Ulanji, the database functionality already exists. You don't have to pay for custom programming. We also won't charge you an arm and leg for design because we don't believe that expensive bells and whistles contribute to the success of a site. In fact, most studies indicate that anything that distracts the visitor or decreases the site's performance has a detrimental effect.

So, if you paid somebody off the street a few hundred bucks, you probably wasted that few hundred bucks. On the other hand, if you opted for super fancy, you probably won't see the long term value in that decision either.