Why we went subscription-only (and never went back).
Two years ago we stopped sending hourly invoices. What replaced them was a single monthly number that covers everything we do for a client. Here's what changed — for us, and more importantly, for them.
For the first five years of the studio, we billed the way everyone does. Project fee up front, then an hourly rate for anything beyond scope, with a "retainer" agreement for ongoing work. It was fine. It wasn't great. There was always a small argument each month about what counted as a new feature versus a bug fix versus a design tweak, and whether the thirty-minute call to discuss it should be on the bill.
Then we sat down with our accountant at the end of a year and actually looked at the numbers. Not profit and loss — where we spent our time. What we found was that the three clients with the lowest margin were the three we liked working with the most, because they didn't watch the clock. And the three with the highest margin were the three we dreaded opening emails from, because every conversation started with "how much will this cost."
We had built a billing model that punished the clients we wanted and rewarded the ones we didn't.
What hourly billing actually rewards
If you bill by the hour, the thing you are selling is more hours. That is not a trivial observation. It shapes every incentive in the relationship.
It rewards complexity. A complicated solution takes longer to build, which means more billable hours, which means more revenue. A simple, elegant solution that takes half the time is financially worse for you — even though it's better for the client in every other way.
It rewards caution. If you're billing by the hour and something might take five hours but could take fifteen, you quote fifteen. You won't be wrong, and you'll eat the difference as profit. The client pays for uncertainty that you are much better positioned to absorb than they are.
It rewards scope creep. Every conversation about "can we also..." is a chance to write more hours. Agencies rarely push back against scope creep because scope creep is the business model.
Most consequentially, it rewards distance. An hourly relationship works best when the client doesn't know exactly what's happening day to day. Transparency is a financial liability. That's why most agency status reports are vague and most agency invoices are specific.
The thing you are selling is more hours. That is not a trivial observation. It shapes every incentive in the relationship.
What one flat number rewards
When you move to a flat monthly fee, every incentive flips.
Simplicity becomes the goal. A site that doesn't break costs us nothing to maintain. A site that has fourteen custom plugins and a Rube Goldberg deployment pipeline costs us weekends. We make more money by building things that are boring in the right places.
Fast conversations become valuable. We no longer dread a Tuesday email from a client. Answering it quickly costs us ten minutes. Not answering it means it festers, they eventually call, we spend an hour. The incentive to be responsive is aligned with the client's interests instead of against them.
Small improvements happen on their own. When a client says "I noticed the booking form is a bit slow on mobile," under hourly billing that turns into a conversation about whether it counts as a bug or an optimisation. Under a subscription, we just fix it — because it's Tuesday and we've got an hour, and a faster form means fewer support emails for both of us later.
The relationship becomes long-term by default. A client on a monthly subscription is someone we want to keep for five years. That changes how we build. We stop taking shortcuts that will bite us in eighteen months, because we will still be the ones dealing with them in eighteen months.
The kinds of projects this doesn't work for
We're honest about this: subscription-only doesn't suit everyone.
If you want a brochure site built, never updated, and then maintained essentially by nobody — hire someone on a one-off project basis. You'd be paying us monthly for work we wouldn't be doing.
If you want to fully own the code and operational stack yourself — move it, change hosts, hire your own in-house team to maintain it — don't hire us. What we charge monthly is partly the build, partly the hosting, partly the ongoing attention. We're not a contract dev shop; we're a studio that runs the things we make.
If you want a twenty-person platform built in six weeks to chase a deadline — we're too small, and our pace is too deliberate. The pricing model is beside the point; the fit isn't there.
For everyone else — most small-to-medium operators who want a proper site, want it to keep improving, and don't want to become part-time product managers — a subscription is just quieter. It's one line in the monthly P&L, like electricity.
What we've learned
Two years in, a few honest things.
The kind of client who agrees to a subscription without negotiating is almost always a better client than the one who tries to pare it down. This sounds like a vague vibe. It's not. The pricing has become a filter, and the filter has been more reliable than any other signal we've tried. If the first email is a negotiation, the next two years will be too.
We charge more monthly than the hourly version would have averaged to. This surprised us. We thought we'd take a margin hit in exchange for predictability; we ended up with better margins because we stopped being paid to do slow things slowly. The per-hour rate we're implicitly charging is higher now than when we had a per-hour rate.
Clients tell us about features they want more often. This was unexpected. Under hourly, they'd hesitate to mention an idea because they were thinking about the invoice. Under a subscription, they mention everything, and most of it we just build. The communication channel opens up in a way that produces better product, not more billable time.
The last thing: the first month of a subscription is always the most awkward. The client half-expects us to send a second invoice. The second month it becomes normal. The sixth month it's invisible, and that's the point. Paying your website studio should feel the same as paying your web hosting — present but forgettable.
We're not evangelists. Hourly billing works fine for all kinds of professional services. It just doesn't work for the kind of work we want to do, or the kind of clients we want to do it for. The subscription isn't a trick or a packaging decision. It's the pricing model that lets us build the way we actually want to build.