Told to you up front, in whole numbers.

No, and it's the question I get most, so here's the detail. Your email and your website are two different things that happen to share a name, pointed to by separate records. I read what your domain is doing before I touch it, and I move the site in whichever way leaves those mail records exactly as they are.

The one exception is if your email came bundled with your current website provider, since some of them sell both. That one is a real move rather than a non event, and I'll spot it when I look at what you've got and tell you what's involved before anything starts.

It's for changes, not for the website. That's yours already, bought and paid for at launch, and you'll never get another bill from me for it.

Take the plan if you'd rather send things over whenever they come up and not think about it again. If you only change things now and then, skip it and pay $50 when something needs doing. Either way is fine by me.

All three. Your domain is registered in your name, your hosting is in your name, and the logins are yours. The site itself is a folder of ordinary files and you get a copy of that too.

So you can take the whole thing to somebody else without my permission or my help. That's deliberate, and it's the opposite of how the platform you're on now works.

You give me access to your own account, and that's how I build the site and make changes later. You can take that access away whenever you like, and if you stop working with me, you should.

Common, and not a problem. You buy it yourself at the start of the build and I'll send you a step by step guide. Usually around $15 a year, paid straight to the registrar rather than to me.

It's in your name and on your card from the first day, so nothing about your website depends on me still being around in five years.

Usually the opposite. If you're using a page builder, you're paying every month for something that tends to be slower than a hand built site, and the build usually pays for itself in a year or two. Send me the address and I'll tell you whether it's worth changing.

Not easily, and I'd rather say so than oversell it. These are hand built files rather than a drag and drop editor, which is exactly why they're fast and cheap to host. The tradeoff is that changes come through me. That's what the $25 a month plan is for, and why one off changes are $50 rather than something painful.

That I don't count them. It doesn't mean instantly, and the difference matters.

Care plan changes go out in one run a week. Send things over whenever you think of them and they go on the list for that week's run. Most people send two or three at a time: a price that's gone up, a photo swapped out, different hours over Christmas. Batching them is exactly why the plan is $25 a month and not $200.

If something is actually wrong rather than just due an update, a phone number that's out of date or a link that's broken, say so and I will prioritize it. I'm not going to leave a mistake sitting on your site for a week.

Nothing happens to your site. Your hosting is in your own account and doesn't run through the plan, so cancelling just means changes go back to $50 a batch. Nothing is held hostage.

About a week, once I have your photos and details. The slow part is almost never the building, it's waiting on content, so the more you send up front the faster it goes.

There's no counter, and I'm not going to argue with you over a heading.

What keeps this to a week is that the changes happen while I'm building it. I send you the site to read through, you come back with everything in one go, and I make the changes. That's the loop the timeline is built around.

If you go quiet for a while that's fine, but I'll move on to the next build and come back to yours when you're ready. After it goes live, changes go on the $25 a month plan or $50 a batch.

Then we stop and you keep what's been built. The deposit covers the work already done, so if we've barely started I'll refund most of it, and if it's nearly finished I won't.

It wouldn't be my bill, and you'd hear about it before I did. The hosting account is in your name, so anything about pricing goes to your inbox rather than mine.

It's also the least likely thing on this page. Your site is a folder of files with no database behind it, which costs a company almost nothing to serve, and more than one of them gives that away to win over developers.

Some free plans do cap how much traffic they'll serve in a month. If yours has one I'll tell you the number when we set it up, and most local businesses never come close to it.

If it ever did change, you're not stuck and you're not on your own. I'd help you find somewhere else and help you move it, which for a site like yours is an afternoon. It runs on any host in the world and you have a copy of it.

That portability is the real guarantee, and it's the thing a page builder can't sell you at any price. What traps people isn't the monthly fee. It's that leaving means starting over.

One person, no office, no sales team, no project managers. And a five page site is genuinely a week of work rather than a quarter. An agency quoting $3,000 isn't necessarily overcharging you, they just have a lot more to pay for than I do.