Frequently Asked Questions

Yes, genuinely, for both packages. Whether you go Streamlined or fully custom, the site itself runs on the same foundation: Cloudflare Pages and Sanity's free tiers. The design work changes between packages; the hosting underneath doesn't. You pay once for the build. No invoice shows up next year.

In plain terms, here's what that free tier actually covers:

• Page traffic - no cap. Your site's pages, images, and assets can be viewed as many times as people show up.
• Media storage - enough room for hundreds of projects' worth of images before you'd need to think about it.
• Monthly content-management bandwidth - enough to handle real visitor traffic, not just a trickle.
• Publishing updates - plenty of headroom for normal day-to-day edits; you won't run into a wall from updating your site regularly.

These are the free-tier numbers as published by Cloudflare and Sanity directly — worth a quick look if you're the type who likes to see the exact figures for yourself, since providers do update them over time.

Where it stops making sense is genuinely different territory: a shop processing thousands of orders a month, self-hosting hours of raw video instead of embedding it, or the kind of traffic spike that comes from actually going viral. If that's closer to what you're planning, let's talk before you commit — but for the working portfolio or small business site most people need, this isn't a compromise. It's just how it's built.

That comfortably covers the vast majority of portfolio and small studio sites - unlimited page traffic, generous CMS storage for hundreds of projects, and enough monthly bandwidth to handle real visitors, not just a trickle. Where it stops making sense is genuinely different territory: a shop processing thousands of orders a month, self-hosting hours of raw video instead of embedding it, or the kind of traffic spike that comes from actually going viral. If that's closer to what you're planning, let's talk before you commit - but for the working portfolio or small business site most people need, this isn't a compromise. It's just how it's built.

It sounds like a pitch, but it's actually just how a lot of the internet already runs. You've probably used Gmail for years without ever being billed. I’ve had the same free Gmail account for over two decades myself. GitHub, the tool most of the software industry runs on every day, offers a free tier solid enough for real commercial work, not just hobby projects - the free/paid line there is about team size, not personal-versus-business use. Cloudflare and Sanity work the same way: free tiers generous enough to run real projects indefinitely, because these companies make their money from big customers who eventually outgrow the free tier, not from squeezing small ones.

It depends which package you're looking at.

Streamlined: you're paying for the wiring - schema design, deployment pipeline, domain setup, payment integration, and the dozen small decisions that turn "free hosting exists" into "a working, professional site that doesn't break." It's built on a flexible system, not a single rigid template. You can set how your nav aligns, whether your homepage opens with a full-bleed hero image, a muted looping video, or a showreel-style video intro (a common choice for motion designers), and how your headline and subhead are positioned and offset. What you're choosing from is a considered set of options, not a blank canvas. If you've got the time and patience to learn Astro, Sanity, and Cloudflare yourself, you genuinely can. What you're paying for is the shortcut - getting it right the first time, without the debugging, delivered in about a few days.

Custom: this is honestly no different from hiring any freelancer or agency for bespoke web design — real design work, built around exactly what you need, at a real design-work price. You'll pay a one-time build fee either way, mine or theirs. The difference shows up afterward, in two places.

• First, hosting: most agencies build the site and hand you the bill for keeping it online — you pick a hosting plan and pay for it yourself, every month, for as long as the site exists.
• Second, maintenance: A common choice among agencies is WordPress, and WordPress genuinely needs ongoing upkeep — the core software and plugins need regular security patches, or the site becomes a real target, or the site becomes a real target. That's why a monthly maintenance retainer (commonly anywhere from $50 to a few hundred dollars a month) is standard on top of hosting. It's not a scam, it's a real cost of that kind of system.
  
  Here, there's no equivalent bill for either. My sites are built on a newer kind of architecture (Astro, for the curious) — no database sitting behind your website for anyone to break into, no backend server there for attackers to even aim at. That's what removes the need for ongoing maintenance. And hosting itself runs on the same free infrastructure covered elsewhere in these FAQs — so there's nothing recurring on that front either.

Fair question. Platforms do shift pricing over time. If that happens within the first two years after your site goes live, I'll help you migrate to a suitable alternative - no extra charge for my time, and it's written into the contract, not just a promise. Further down the line, migration assistance is scoped and quoted like any other project (predicting exactly what the infrastructure landscape looks like a decade out isn't something anyone can responsibly promise for free) , but you're never left stuck: you'll always have your source files and documentation to migrate with, whether that's with me or someone else.

Yes, through Sanity's editor. Swap images, edit text, add new work, just like using a blog.

That's the custom tier. Tell me what you have in mind and I'll quote it separately.

Custom domain optional - that's still between you and your registrar. If a yourname.pages.dev address doesn't bother you, you can skip buying a domain entirely and your site will still be live and reachable at that address, free.

The Streamlined package: about 1-3 business days from the intake form - your site name, homepage layout preference to start with. Check out Process.

The Custom tier depends on scope; once I've quoted it, we'll lock in a timeline together and put it in the contract.

Streamlined package: cancel anytime before we deliver your site, and you'll get a full refund minus a flat $50 admin fee - no matter what stage you're at. Once it's delivered, see the next bit on revisions and review time.

Custom package: payment is split into two stages — 50% deposit when we sign the agreement, and the remaining 50% when your project is delivered. That deposit covers the discovery and design work that happens before we build, so once I've started, it's not refundable — same as most bespoke design services. Two rounds of revisions are built into the process, so "not quite right yet" gets fixed as part of the deal, not billed separately.