Agency Advice

If a price looks low next to agencies offering a similar combination of services, the reasonable assumption is that something's being cut — junior staff, less review, corners on quality. Sometimes that assumption is right. Here's what's actually true on our side, so you can judge it instead of guessing at it.

What we're not paying for

A lot of agency overhead has nothing to do with the work itself. Larger studios often route client communication through an account manager, who relays requests to the designers and developers actually doing the work. That layer adds cost and adds a game of telephone — the person you talk to isn't always the person building your site. We skip that layer. The person on the call is the person doing the work, which removes a real cost center without touching quality.

Where AI tools actually fit in

We'd rather undersell this than oversell it. AI coding and design tools don't make anyone automatically faster — plenty of teams have found the opposite, especially when the tools get used to skip understanding the work rather than skip typing it out. Where they genuinely help is narrower than the marketing around them suggests: turning an approved design into boilerplate code structure, and speeding up early rounds of design exploration before anything's been decided. That's specifically how we use Cursor and Claude on the development side, and Figma's AI features on the design side — for the repetitive, structural parts of a build, not for the judgment calls. Every screen and every piece of functionality still gets a human review pass before it ships. The tools shorten the mechanical parts of the timeline; they don't replace the parts that require someone experienced to actually think.

What we're not cutting

The senior-only team structure means the people working on your project aren't junior staff learning on the job. Bespoke projects still get a dedicated project manager, because a custom build genuinely needs that coordination. Review and QA aren't skipped to hit a lower price point — they're the same process regardless of which package you're on, because a broken site costs everyone more than a slower one.

The honest tradeoff

Lower overhead and faster delivery on the mechanical parts of a build is a real, defensible reason for a lower price. It is not the same claim as "we do the same thing for less because we're better" — we're not claiming that. We're claiming the parts of the cost that don't affect the work you actually experience (an account-management layer, slower boilerplate) are the parts we've cut, and the parts that do affect it (who's doing the work, how carefully it's reviewed) are the parts we haven't touched.