Funded once, standing for years.
Custom websites for nonprofits, built in Edmonton and handed over whole. The usual arrangement is a template on a monthly subscription, set up by someone who then disappears. Two years later the programs have changed, nobody on staff can edit the page, and the invoice still arrives every month.
The arithmetic nobody shows you.
A builder subscription at thirty dollars a month is eighteen hundred dollars over five years. At the end of the five years you own nothing. The site cannot move to another provider, the pages still fight you every time a program changes, and the next invoice is already scheduled.
We build it once and hand it over. After that the files are yours, they sit in your own accounts, and the hosting costs nothing.
$1,800Five years on a builder subscription
$0Five years of hosting from us
Terms written for how you operate.
- You own the files. Not a licence to use them, the files themselves, and they live in accounts with your name on them. Stop working with us tomorrow and nothing switches off, and nothing is held back.
- Hosting is free. A static site runs at no monthly cost on the accounts we set up in your name. There is no renewal invoice, because there is nothing to renew.
- Your staff update it. Programs, news, events, board members and contact details live in plain text files. A staff member signs in, clicks the words to change, types and publishes, and the site updates in about a minute. No page builder, no support ticket, no waiting on us.
- Instructions in plain language. Every site ships with written instructions aimed at whoever inherits the job, not at a developer, so a change of phone number does not become a support request.
- Written for a funder. The price is a flat fee against a written scope, so it drops into a communications or capacity building line without anyone having to explain it. We can set the quote out in whatever form your funder asks for.
- Accessible by default. Proper headings and labels, keyboard navigation and contrast that holds up, because some of the people you serve need it and because funders ask.
- In person if you want it. We are in Edmonton and we will come and sit with your staff. We also work with organizations well outside the city, and it changes nothing about how the project runs.
Where the money usually comes from.
Website work rarely comes out of operating budget, and it does not have to. In our experience it is paid from a capacity building or communications line that is already allocated and has to be spent before the cycle closes.
If you are not sure whether you have one of those, ask your finance lead before you decide this is out of reach.
- Capacity building grants. These often name communications infrastructure as eligible, and a website is infrastructure.
- Communications budget lines. Often underspent by the time the cycle closes, and a website qualifies against them.
- Program funding. If the site carries a funded program, part of the build may be eligible against it.
- Timing matters. Ask in the last quarter of your fiscal year and we can usually build to the date the money has to be spent.
Ben Calf Robe Society
An Indigenous nonprofit in Edmonton, off a builder template and onto a custom site their own staff maintain. Eleven pages and a content system that needs no code. The files are theirs.