stacq

Your Clients Keep Asking Who Should Handle Their Website. That Question Could Pay You Every Month.

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 16:30:05 GMT

Digital marketers & business consultants: how often does a client ask you who should handle their website?

If the answer is "all the time," that question could be paying you every month.

The question you already get asked

You're running their ads, their social, their SEO or their operations, and the website keeps coming up. It's slow. It's dated. The person who built it disappeared. Or they just want someone reliable to own it so they can stop thinking about it.

Most people in your seat have two options. Take it on reluctantly and quietly become a part-time web company, or point the client somewhere & move on without earning anything for the referral. There's a better answer.

How the partner program works

Stacq is a comprehensive online presence management platform for small businesses, and our agency partner program pays you every month for every client you refer, for as long as they stay with us.

The rates are simple. $40 a month for every client on a Basic plan and $60 a month for every client on an Advanced plan. If you'd rather be paid once a year, that's $600 or $900 per client annually instead. You pick the model that suits you when you set up.

It's recurring for the life of the subscription. Commission starts once a client's billing begins (nothing accrues during their free trial) and continues every month they pay. No tiers, no ramps & no expiry.

It compounds quickly. Ten Advanced clients is $600 a month. Fifty is $3,000 a month, every month, for as long as they stay. Every client you add stacks on top of the ones already paying you.

There's also a $5,000 bonus every time you hit another 100 paying clients. At 100, again at 200, again at 300, with no cap, and it's added to your next monthly payout automatically.

You don't have to become a web company to earn it

We handle the website: the design & build, the hosting, the monitoring, the edits and the support. Your client gets a site that's looked after properly, and you never have to field a "the contact form is broken" email again.

You keep doing what you do best.

Your clients stay yours

We don't do digital marketing ourselves, so there's no risk of us pitching your clients on ads, social or SEO. Your marketing relationship stays exactly where it is. We'll even send some of our clients your way as well.

Put our free audit tool on your own site

Agency partners can embed our free website audit tool right on their own website, in their own colors. A prospect enters their website address and their report appears on your page: scores for site health, AI search readiness & speed, plus the full list of what needs fixing once they enter their email.

If they sign up with us, the referral is matched to you automatically. Any business that runs an audit on your site and signs up with Stacq within 90 days is credited to your account. Nothing to submit, no referral code to hand out.

It's also a useful thing to have in front of someone right before you pitch them.

Not an agency?

Consultants, sale professionals, freelancers & anyone else with small business contacts can join as an affiliate instead. The rates are the same, and your referrals are credited through your own tracking link or coupon code.

And if you run a web agency that already bills clients monthly for their sites, our white-label program is probably the better fit.

Learn more

Everything is laid out here: stacq.io/partners

If you have any questions or would like to learn more, feel free to reach out.

RIP to Charging Thousands for a Website: Why We Build Ours for Free

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 18:47:26 GMT

For a long time, getting a website for a small business worked the same way. You paid an agency or a freelancer a few thousand dollars up front, waited a few weeks, got a nice new site, and then you were more or less on your own.

We think that model is on its way out. So we build ours for free.

Why give away the thing everyone else charges for?

Because the website was never the whole job. Launch day is the easiest day in a website's life. Everything is fresh, every link works & every form goes somewhere. The trouble starts afterward, quietly, while you're busy running the business:

An integration changes and your contact form stops sending.
A page gets removed and the button pointing to it now goes nowhere.
The site slows down and visitors leave before it finishes loading.
You slip in Google results & nobody notices for months.
Reviews come in on your Google Business Profile & sit there unanswered.

None of that sets off an alarm. It shows up as fewer calls, and by the time you notice, it's been costing you for a while.

A great site that nobody's watching still breaks. So the website is just our foot in the door, and what we really do is everything around it.

What "everything around it" actually means

Stacq is a comprehensive online presence management platform for small businesses. Once your site is live, here's what's running for you in the background.

Monitoring, day & night. We check that your site is up every 15 minutes, around the clock, and check your SSL certificate & look for broken pages every day. Your forms & phone links are checked every time someone visits. If something breaks, our team hears about it, so your customers don't have to be the ones who find it.

A monthly health report. Once a month you get a full audit of your site, with scores for site health, AI search, speed & SEO, plus your uptime, your SSL status and a list of anything that needs attention.

Managed edits. Every live site includes 30 minutes of edits a month. Tell us what you want changed & we make the change. Bigger projects are billed hourly for the time actually spent, or you can buy an edit pack up front at a discount. And if you'd rather make a quick change yourself, you have access to the site editor too.

Unified reporting. Your Google Analytics, Google Search Console & conversion tracking (phone taps, form submissions & button clicks) in one dashboard, with plain-English AI insights, so you don't need to be an analyst to understand what's working.

Google review management. See every review across your locations, reply from the dashboard with an AI-drafted response you can edit, get alerted when new reviews come in, and put your best reviews on your website.

Competitor tracking. Track up to 5 competitors. Every month we audit their sites and show you their scores next to yours, what they charge, and what their customers praise & complain about in their reviews.

Live chat & email campaigns. Answer chats from visitors on your site, and send review requests or promotions to your customer list, styled with your own logo & colors.

All of it lives in one place, behind one login.

So what does "free" actually cover?

On a 24-month plan, there's no setup fee. We design & build your new site (or rebuild the one you have), and the build itself costs you nothing. Plans run $99 to $149 a month depending on the size of your site.

You see the finished site before you pay. There's a free trial, and it doesn't start until you've reviewed your finished site. No card is needed to sign up.

Prefer a shorter commitment? 12-month and month-to-month plans are available too, with a one-time setup fee. Everything is laid out in our pricing section.

What we're not

We're not a marketing agency. We don't run your ads or your social media. What we do is make sure the thing all of that points to, your website & your presence on Google, is fast, healthy, up to date and actually working. If you already have a marketer you love, we make their job easier.

Get more than just a website

If your current site was a one-time project that nobody has looked at since, it's probably due for a checkup. Run our free website audit to see where it stands, or read what a free website audit actually checks first.

Ready to hand it off? See plans & pricing .

The $10,000 Typo: Why Your Team is Afraid to Update Your Website

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 06:12:30 GMT

It’s 3:00 PM on a Friday. You ask your office manager to log into the company website to quickly update a seasonal promotion or change your holiday hours.

Instead of a quick two-minute task, you are met with hesitation. They are terrified to click "Publish."

Why? Because the last time someone tried to fix a simple typo on your legacy WordPress site, a plugin updated, the homepage layout shattered on mobile devices, and the "Request a Quote" form silently stopped working.

For local service trades, multi-office law firms, and medical clinics, a website isn't just a digital brochure; it is a cash register. And when your team is afraid to touch it, your business suffers.

The Real Cost of Fragile Infrastructure

When a website is built on a fragile, unstructured foundation, a small mistake doesn't just look bad; it directly impacts your bottom line.

If an employee accidentally deletes the CSS code attached to your mobile "Click-to-Call" button while trying to update a headline, you won't just get an error message. You will lose phone calls. If that button stays broken over a weekend, a high-ticket emergency plumbing repair or a high-value legal consultation will simply go to your competitor.

That is the $10,000 typo . It is the hidden cost of giving a non-technical employee full backend access to a site where the content and the design code are hopelessly tangled together.

Collaboration Shouldn't Equal Risk

To prevent these disasters, businesses usually do one of two things: they either lock their own staff out of the website entirely and pay an agency a high hourly rate for every minor text change (the "dev tax"), or they just let the website sit there, slowly becoming outdated and irrelevant.

It shouldn't be this way. You shouldn't have to choose between a stale website and a broken one.

At Stacq, we believe that collaboration shouldn't equal risk. When we perform a Site Flip, we migrate your existing legacy site onto a managed infrastructure equipped with strict editing guardrails .

How We Kill the Fear of Editing

We eliminate the fear of updating your website by fundamentally changing how your team interacts with it:

Design Locking: We separate the content from the code. We lock the structural layouts, padding, and mobile responsiveness. We only leave the content fields (the text and images) editable. Your marketing coordinator can easily swap out a banner image, but they literally cannot break the container holding it.
Role-Based Permissions: Not everyone needs master access. Our platform allows you to assign specific roles to specific team members. You can give a copywriter access to publish blog posts without giving them the ability to delete a service page.
Active Site Monitoring: Our infrastructure actively monitors your most critical conversion points. We track your SSL certificates, uptime, and form delivery health, so you never have to guess if your leads are actually reaching your inbox.

The Ultimate Safety Net: Automated Backups

Even with the best guardrails in place, human error happens. What makes a modern infrastructure truly enterprise-grade is how it handles those errors.

Our platform captures a complete, secure snapshot of your website every single night, as well as immediately every time you hit "Publish." If someone on your team accidentally deletes an entire paragraph of text, there is no need to panic and no need to pay a developer an emergency weekend rate.

Rolling the site back to a perfectly stable version is just one click away.

You deserve the freedom to edit your site, and your team deserves the peace of mind to do it confidently.

Give your team the freedom to edit without the fear of breaking things. Find out if your current website qualifies for our managed infrastructure in under two minutes.

Is Your Website Ready for AI Agents? (Why Legacy Sites Will Be Left Behind)

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 05:56:14 GMT

Artificial Intelligence is making a massive leap. We are moving past the era of AI simply answering questions ( chatbots ) and entering the era of AI taking action ( AI agents ).

In the very near future, you won't just ask an AI to write a blog post for your business; you will ask an AI agent to draft the post, format it, upload an image, and publish it directly to your website. You'll ask it to update your holiday hours, swap out a promotional banner, or add a new team member to your "About" page.

It sounds like the ultimate operational shortcut. But there is a massive catch: If your business is running on a legacy website, letting an AI agent touch it is a recipe for disaster.

The Danger of the "Black Box" Legacy Website

Most mid-market businesses operate on older, fragile CMS platforms like WordPress. Over the years, these sites turn into "black boxes", tangled webs of messy code, overlapping plugins, and custom CSS where the design and the content are hopelessly mashed together.

For a human developer, navigating this mess is frustrating and time-consuming. For an automated AI agent, it is a minefield.

If an AI tool tries to update a headline in a traditional page builder, it doesn't just change the words. It can easily overwrite the underlying HTML, accidentally delete the styling code that keeps the box mobile-responsive, or break the container entirely. Instead of saving you time, the AI agent crashes your layout, forcing you to pay a developer an emergency hourly rate to fix it.

What AI Agents Actually Need: A Semantic, Componentized Framework

To safely automate website updates, AI agents require structure. They cannot reliably edit messy, unstructured code. They need a componentized, semantic framework.

What does that mean? It means separating the design of your website from the content of your website.

When a site is built on modern, managed infrastructure, the code is semantic (clean, predictable HTML5).

This not only makes it incredibly easy for next-generation search engines (like SearchGPT or Google AI Overviews) to read and rank your site, but it allows automation tools to inject data without touching the code.

Future-Proofing with Strict Editing Guardrails

At Stacq, we believe the future of web management is collaborative between human teams and AI agents. That is why our Site Flip process rebuilds legacy websites onto a strictly guarded infrastructure.

We future-proof your digital presence using two core principles:

Design Locking: When we migrate your site, we lock the global layouts, padding, and structural components. We only leave the content fields (the text and the images) editable. An AI agent can swap the data, but it literally cannot break the structure.
Granular Role-Based Permissions: You shouldn't have to hand over the master keys to an AI tool. Our platform allows you to assign "Basic AI Agent Access", allowing a tool to draft content safely while keeping your core layout locked and protected from accidental breakage.

Stop Managing Code. Start Managing Content.

The businesses that will win the next decade are the ones that can adapt quickly and deploy content frictionlessly. You cannot do that if you are terrified that your website will break every time someone, human or machine, clicks "Edit."

If you want to take advantage of AI automation tomorrow, you need to get your website off of fragile, legacy infrastructure today.

Future-proof your web presence before your competitors do. Learn how our AI-ready infrastructure protects your digital assets and eliminates the "dev tax" forever.

The Hidden Cost of Your Website: Why It’s Time to Stop Paying the "Dev Tax"

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 05:43:20 GMT

You invested heavily to have your company's website designed and launched. So why does it feel like you are still paying for it every single month?

For many mid-market businesses, from multi-office law firms to regional home service companies, launching a website is just the beginning of a never-ending cycle of expenses. You get a bill for hosting. Then an invoice for a "security update." Then a quote for $150 just to swap out a team member's headshot or update a practice area.

We call this the "Dev Tax." And if your website is strictly for marketing and lead generation, it is a tax you should no longer be paying.

What exactly is the "Dev Tax"?

The Dev Tax is the recurring financial and operational penalty businesses pay for hosting simple websites on fragile, overly complex infrastructure.

If your website is built on a legacy CMS like WordPress, it relies on a precarious house of cards: a core system, a specific theme, and a dozen third-party plugins. When one of those pieces updates, the others can break. To prevent your site from crashing, traditional agencies charge you a monthly retainer to "babysit" the code.

You are paying the Dev Tax every time you:

Pay an agency hourly to fix a layout that randomly broke on mobile.
Wait three days for a developer to publish a simple blog post or update a seasonal promotion.
Pay a monthly fee just to ensure your contact forms haven't silently stopped delivering leads.

The Trap of the "Care Plan"

To solve this anxiety, many web agencies sell monthly "Care Plans" or "Maintenance Packages." They promise peace of mind by actively managing your plugin updates and patching security holes.

But here is the hard truth: Care plans only treat the symptoms; they don't cure the disease. Paying an agency to constantly patch vulnerabilities on a 25-page informational website is like paying a mechanic a monthly retainer to constantly refill a leaking radiator. At a certain point, you don't need a better mechanic; you need a modern, reliable engine.

Simplicity is the Ultimate Security

Most businesses do not need custom server stacks, raw database access, or complex open-source platforms. You need a site that loads instantly, ranks well on Google, captures leads, and is easy for your internal team to update.

By migrating your site onto a managed, serverless infrastructure, you completely eliminate the root causes of the Dev Tax:

No Plugins to Break: Managed infrastructure means core features (like forms, SSL, and mobile responsiveness) are built natively into the platform. There is nothing to update, and therefore, nothing to break.
Strict Editing Guardrails: Instead of locking you out of your own site, a modern platform utilizes componentized design. You can assign role-based permissions to your office manager, marketing team, or external copywriters, allowing them to safely update text and images with absolute zero risk of altering the core layout.
Automated Safety Nets: True peace of mind comes from infrastructure that protects itself. With automated nightly backups and backups upon every publish, a human error is instantly fixable with a single-click restore.

Reclaim Your Marketing Budget

Your website should be a static, predictable operational cost, not a chaotic line item.

When you eliminate the Dev Tax, you stop paying rent on fragile infrastructure. That means you can reallocate those funds away from basic "maintenance" and put them toward what actually matters: SEO, content creation, and driving new revenue.

You don't need a developer on speed dial just to exist on the internet. You just need a better foundation.

Ready to simplify your company's web stack? Find out if your legacy site qualifies for a Stacq Site Flip. Move your website to an unbreakable, managed infrastructure in just a few days.