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

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.