What a radio station website should cost

A station owner told me recently that he wanted a new website. I asked what the last one had cost him. He couldn’t remember the total — only that he’d been paying monthly for over a year, and that the final payment was a little over a thousand dollars.

He couldn’t remember.

Sit with that one. This is a man who knows what his tower insurance runs and what he pays an hour for a fill-in board op. He could not tell me what he’d spent on his own website, because it never showed up as a number. It showed up as a series of them.

The mechanic problem

Let me name the fear before I answer it, because everybody else in this business tries to reassure you past it instead.

You take the truck in. They quote you a price. Then the phone rings — while it was up on the lift they found something else, and that something else is another six hundred dollars, and you can’t exactly say no, because the truck is in pieces. You didn’t get a bad quote. You got a quote that was never the whole thing.

That’s what people brace for with a website, and they brace for it because that’s generally what happens. The quote covers the build. Hosting’s separate. The SSL certificate is separate, and nobody ever explained what an SSL certificate is — only that your site says “not secure” without one. And the thing you assumed was included, like moving a show on the schedule, turns out to be billable at an hourly rate you agreed to in a paragraph you skimmed.

By the end you can’t say what it cost. Not because you weren’t paying attention. Because there was never one number to remember.

Why nobody publishes a price

Go and look. Search for somebody who builds radio station websites and try to find out what they charge. You’ll get “custom solutions tailored to your station’s needs” and a contact form.

There’s a reason, and it isn’t that the work is unpredictable. A price you can’t see is a price you can’t compare, and a price you can’t compare can be whatever the vendor reckons you’ll pay. Put a discovery call in front of it, add a proposal document and some vocabulary you don’t have, and the whole thing starts to feel complicated enough to justify whatever number turns up at the end.

It isn’t that complicated. I’ve been in radio since I was twelve and I’ve built and run this exact thing for my own station. A station website is a known shape — shows, hosts, a schedule, a way to listen, events, somewhere to put your sponsors, and a page the FCC might want to see. It doesn’t need discovering. It needs building properly and keeping running.

What we charge

$695 once, and $99 a month. That’s it, and it’s sitting on the price list where you can read it without talking to me first.

The $695 is the build — your branding, your colors, your existing content moved across, your domain pointed at it, and launch. You pay it at launch, not at signup. If we never get you live, you never pay it.

The $99 covers everything it takes to keep a website being a website. Hosting. The SSL certificate, set up and renewing on its own, so nobody ever has to think about it again. The content editor, so you can move a show yourself in about a minute. And anything you’d rather hand to us, done inside two business days.

Two things can cost more, and both are on the price list with their own numbers. Live video costs extra only if you haven’t got a stream of your own — if you’re already going out on YouTube or Twitch we embed it, and that’s free, because it costs us nothing to serve. Live chat is an add-on.

That’s the whole list. There’s no third thing waiting on the lift.

Why there’s no contract

Because there doesn’t need to be one.

Lock-in protects a vendor who’s carrying a cost. When somebody waives your setup fee, they’ve paid for your build out of their own pocket — so now they need you to stay long enough to earn it back, so now you’re signing twelve months. That contract isn’t there because they’re confident. It’s there because they’re exposed.

We charge the setup fee, so we’re not exposed. The build’s already paid for. If you leave in month three we’re not out the work, so we don’t need a clause stopping you, so you can go month to month and stay because it’s working rather than because leaving is expensive. And if you do go, the site goes with you — your domain, your content.

Which means the no-contract promise is downstream of the setup fee. So when somebody offers you a free build, they’re not being more generous than us. They’re being less.

You don’t have to know what you want

The other thing that stops people has nothing to do with money. It’s the worry that they’re about to be asked a lot of questions they can’t answer.

Most web outfits open with a questionnaire. What’s your color palette. Who are your personas. What’s your content strategy. It generates a great deal of anxiety and almost no information, because by the time you filled that form in you’d already had a conversation with them and they already knew most of it. The form is theater.

You don’t need to know what an SSL certificate is. You don’t need to have decided anything. Tell me what’s in your head — what you can’t stand about the site you’ve got, what your station sounds like, what you wish the thing did — and I’ll bring it back as something you can look at.

Getting that out of people is the job I actually had for forty years. It used to happen on the air, and most of the time the guest never noticed it was happening.

You get a working preview inside a few days, on the web, from your own desk. You tell me what’s wrong with it. From yes to live is usually about two weeks.

The number you ought to be able to remember

If you take one thing away from this, take this: you should be able to say out loud what your website costs you, without looking it up.

Mine’s $99 a month. Ask whoever built your current one what yours is, and count how long the answer takes.