How We Work With Clients

Talking about money shouldn’t be awkward. We’d rather be upfront about how we price our work, so you know what to expect before the first conversation gets serious.

There are two ways clients typically work with us, and we treat them as equally legitimate paths. One isn’t a step up from the other. Which one fits depends on what you need, how your year is shaped, and where your budget is most useful.

Fixed-Price Projects

Most of our engagements are scoped, fixed-price projects with a clear beginning, middle, and end. A website. A brand refresh. A messaging platform. A marketing plan. We’ve structured our pricing this way because we know that for many organizations, a defined cost for a defined outcome is easier to budget, easier to defend internally, and easier to commit to than an open-ended relationship.

That’s especially true right now. In a tighter economy, a term-specific, fixed-known cost gives leadership teams the predictability they need to move forward.

Fixed-price clients get the same strategic thinking, the same senior attention, and the same Maine-grounded perspective as our long-term partners. We don’t hold back strategy for clients on retainer.

While projects absolutely vary by size, scope, and style, here are typical project ranges:

Websites: $10,000 – $45,000. WordPress-based, with strategy and content support built in. A straightforward marketing site for an established brand often lands in the lower half of that range. Many of the sites we build come in around the mid-$20s. Highly complex, deeply customized builds — sites with significant functionality, integrations, or content architecture — land in the mid-$40s.

Messaging: $5,000 – $25,000. Includes recruitment, brand, and product or service positioning work.

Brand or Marketing Consulting: starting at $5,000. A focused engagement typically runs $5,000 – $15,000 and produces a comprehensive marketing plan tailored to your goals (collateral not included). More in-depth strategic engagements — broader organizational scope, multiple audiences, deeper research integration — scale up from there.

We’ll always price each project based on your specific scope and our experience with similar work. If your project doesn’t fit neatly into one of these categories, we’ll build a custom proposal.

Agency Partner Program

Our Agency Partner Program is for companies that want a trusted, strategic marketing partner rather than project support. If you need regular creative support guided by strategy, with senior counsel and steady accountability, this is the model that fits.

As an agency partner, you get a senior advisor leading the relationship, along with the depth of our full team behind the work. We become an extension of your marketing function, not a service you call when you need something built.

Agency Partner engagements are typically twelve-month commitments, structured around your business goals and the rhythm of your marketing year.

Time & Materials

When work falls outside a defined project scope — feature updates to an existing site, ad-hoc creative support, smaller pieces of consulting — we bill at a blended rate of $175 per hour. That’s the same rate across our team, regardless of who’s doing the work. We bill in fifteen-minute increments and track our time in our project management system. 

We track our work to the quarter hour in our project management system and bill monthly with summaries.

What You’re Actually Paying For

Our pricing reflects what we bring to the work, not just the hours it takes. Twenty years of helping Maine businesses connect with the people who live, work, and build their lives here. The Maine Insights Lab and our Mindsets of Maine research, which inform how we approach every audience. And a strategy-first approach that connects creative work to business outcomes, so the marketing you invest in actually does its job.

That’s why our clients tend to stay.

Website Hosting & Ongoing Support

We host and maintain WordPress sites we’ve built, and we can also host sites we didn’t build.

• Annual hosting: $1,100/year, prorated for the launch year
  • Our hosting plan includes:
    • Daily, weekly and monthly backups
    • 24/7 uptime monitoring
    • Routine WordPress & plugin updates for functionality and security 
    • Secure, redundant environment
    • Fast recovery support
• Post-launch development and support: billed at our standard $175 blended rate

Hosting starts when the site goes live. All hosting engagements run on a calendar year (January 1 – December 31).

Media & Vendor Management

We apply a 15% markup on third-party vendor purchases and pass commissionable media through at the gross rate without additional markup.

Billing Questions

Invoices include a secure payment link for online payment. For any billing questions, email billing@sutherlandweston.com or call 207-945-9999.

Billing FAQ