Prismotivering: vad en byrå verkligen kostar (och vad DIY verkligen kostar)

En direkt jämförelse av den totala kostnaden för att anlita The Long Way vs. att bygga själv vs. att använda en "gratis" mallbyggare. Med ärliga siffror.

"Why does it cost that much?" is a fair question and we'd rather answer it openly than dance around it. Here is the honest comparison between hiring The Long Way, building it yourself, and using one of the "free" site-builder platforms.

What you get when you hire a provider

A site that ships in days or weeks, not months. Time-to-launch is the most underrated cost saving.
Someone accountable when something breaks at 11 pm the night before a launch. Plumbers, accountants and lawyers all charge for this and we are no different.
A serious SEO foundation from day one — clean structure, fast load times, semantic markup, structured data.
Accessibility compliance built in, which keeps you on the right side of the EU accessibility directive.
Ongoing security maintenance. Most "hacked sites" you read about were running outdated WordPress plugins; we keep dependencies current as a matter of course.
A handover that means you can leave us. The code is yours. Another developer can pick it up tomorrow if you want.

See our services page for tier prices and the Jobs To Be Done resource for guidance on which tier suits which kind of business.

The cost of DIY

DIY can be a perfectly good choice — we've sent business away to do exactly that. But the time cost is almost always under-estimated. A realistic budget:

40–80 hours learning the platform deeply enough to make non-trivial changes, if you have a reasonable technical baseline.
20–40 hourson the visual design and content, if you don't have prior design training.
5–10 hours per quarter on maintenance, security, and the inevitable platform updates that break things.

At any reasonable hourly value of your own time (50 € is conservative for a business owner), that's 3 000–5 000 € of your own labour in the first year alone — for a result that's usually slower, less accessible, and less SEO-friendly than the equivalent agency build. And every hour you spent wrestling with the site builder was an hour you didn't spend on the actual business.

The hidden costs of "free"

Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, Shopify, GoDaddy site builder. They all start free or nearly free, and they all have honest costs the comparison ads don't mention:

You don't own your site. The platform owns the code, controls the database, can change terms or shut down. See our piece on why owning your platform matters.
You're locked in.Migrating off Wix or Squarespace is famously painful. URL structures don't survive, custom CSS doesn't survive, blog posts often need to be re-entered by hand. Lock-in is the business model.
Limited SEO control.You can't fully control the HTML these platforms emit; their templates have known structural problems that hurt rankings. Their own help docs will tell you to "publish more content" rather than fix it.
Generic templates. Visitors recognise a Wix site within a second. That recognition tags your business as generic, regardless of how good your service is.
The monthly bill adds up.A Shopify Basic at ~30 €/mo plus a couple of common apps lands at ~80 €/mo, plus transaction fees on every sale. Over five years, that's ~5 000 € for a site you don't own and can't take with you.
Platform risk.Squarespace pivoted away from its old editor. Shopify has changed payment terms repeatedly. GoDaddy resold a popular site builder and effectively orphaned it. The platform's priorities aren't yours.

"Why not just use Instagram or Facebook?"

Social media is a complement to a website, not a replacement. Three reasons:

You don't own the audience.Followers are a metric in someone else's database. The platform decides who sees what you post.
Algorithm risk.Facebook's organic reach for business pages dropped from ~16% in 2012 to under 2% by the late 2010s — a decline you cannot reverse no matter how good your content is. A single algorithm tweak can erase years of work overnight.
No SEO benefit.Search engines barely index social media content; what they do index, they don't rank highly. A blog post on your own site lives forever; an Instagram post is gone in a week.

Five-year cost-of-ownership comparison

Round numbers, for a small-business brochure site:

The Long Way Standard tier. One-time setup plus ~xx €/mo. Five-year cost: in the same range as Shopify Basic + apps over five years, but with a site you actually own.
DIY on Wix / Weebly. Nominally cheaper on the monthly bill; but factor in your own labour at any honest rate and the gap closes or reverses.
Shopify Basic.~5 000 € over five years, all in transaction fees and app subscriptions. You don't own the site at the end.
Custom premium build. Higher upfront, but appreciates over five years instead of depreciating — you own an asset, not a subscription.

See the full pricing table on /pricing, or use the questionnaire to figure out which tier matches your situation.