Starting July 1st, 2017 will be be raising our hourly rates.
It’s the first time we’ve reviewed our hourly rates in 15 years! We know rate increases are never popular, of course, and we’ve tried to delay this increase for as long as we can (much longer than most other companies!). We all gathered together and discussed what the best plan of attack should be to help compensate for the inflation in technology and internet security that is required of professional design companies of today. Should we raise our monthly subscriptions rates? Should we charge for support & training, or should we force clients into “day-rates” or even worse, fixed monthly design retainers just to start projects (all typical of most design companies)! Nope, after much deliberation we all agreed that if we just raise our hourly design & development rates by a small amount, we would have all our bases covered.
Here’s what’s changing:
- Our standard hourly rate is increasing from $80 to $105 (up by $25 per hour).
- However, for customers who have active monthly content subscriptions, we will not raise your rate as long as your subscriptions stay active.
- We also now offer subscription “work hours” in (5) five hour monthly blocks for:
- $450/m0 ($90/hr) 3-month commitment.
- $400/mo ($80/hr) 6-month commitment.
- Any time accrued above the 5 hour block is billed at your commitment rate and billed to the minute.
- Minimum billable time is now 15 minutes. This means our minimum invoice for work is $26.25 and billed to the minute after that..
- We’ll be introducing some more fixed-fee prices to our work throughout this year, such as New Website Design & Setup, WordPress Migration and new SEO packages, so you have certainty on being given a set price upfront for our work.
Why we’re changing our prices:
- As we haven’t raised our prices since 2002, technology inflation alone accounts for half of the price increase. Security, hardware, software – all this technology keeps increasing from year to year and in order for us to provide the same exemplary service you are accustomed to, we must charge just a little bit more for hourly services.
- The average rate for website work is now $145/hour (according to an independent survey), with roughly 3% of professional web design agencies now charging less than $100/hour, so we’re still very competitive to others.
- Our 23 years of experience now stands above many other design and development companies. We have a proven track record of working with large and small organizations. With our web design work, we now exclusively work with the WordPress platform and are very skilled in this area including performance, security and programming.
- Our response and turnaround times are very fast. Our average “first-reply” time is between 12-15 hours – nearly less than half the time of our industry.
- Our new prices will allow us to expand our support team, bringing project to a close faster.
What we’re not changing:
- Monthly & Yearly Subscription Rates will not change.
- Support for all ILGM Products & Services will remain free of charge.
- Training for all ILGM Products & Services will remain free of charge.
- Many agencies have a “day rate”. We don’t think that’s fair, because what happens if someone is distracted by a call, lunch break, etc. We charge only for the time we’re actually working for you, so we only have hourly rates or agreed fixed-fee projects.