Honest answers.
No marketing-speak.

Busy operators and professional teams who want a real agency behind their site without paying a real-agency retainer. You want it managed — fast, on-brand, ranking — but you don’t want to spend nights inside a page-builder, and you don’t want to write a five-figure check just to fix a typo. You want strategists on call, transparent pricing, and the option to take the keys yourself whenever you feel like it.

No — and we say it plainly. The $89 / $199 / $449 monthly tiers cover hosting plus the human-led strategy and operations engagement after your site is live: a named strategist, your monthly strategy + support hours, the full SEO toolset, AI-visibility tracking, and (on Managed and White-Glove) the Vercel infrastructure. The initial site itself — whether we’re building you something net-new (semi-custom from one of our reference designs) or migrating an existing site (your content, your URLs, your SEO continuity) — is a one-time custom quote, sized to the actual scope of the project. You get that quote on your free 30-minute strategy call with a senior 1Digital® strategist (the person who handles new business AND knows the SEO playbook — not a chatbot, not a script-reading junior BDR) before you commit to anything. Once the site is live, the monthly tier kicks in with the human-led approach, and you have a strategist on call from then on.

You pick the posture. Essentials is human-guided — you drive, and a real strategist is one message away with a kickoff call and operational support when you need it. Managed is human-accompanied — we work alongside you, with monthly strategy time you can spend on SEO consulting or copywriting (your choice). White-Glove is human-led — we run it as your team, with a named strategist, a monthly roadmap call, and proactive monitoring. The level of involvement scales with the plan, and we say it plainly.

The monthly cadence does. Every plan includes strategist hours dedicated to ongoing changes — tweaks, content updates, schema refreshes, copy nudges, conversion experiments — so the site keeps a heartbeat instead of quietly aging. The strategist also proactively flags opportunities (ranking shifts, AI-visibility changes, conversion friction we’re seeing in the data); you don’t have to remember to ask — they ping you with what we’d do. The site stays current with your business so Google and the AI engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini) keep treating it as authoritative. And if you want more aggressive growth work — SEO retainers, paid acquisition, content sprints — service credits from your monthly fee bank toward those engagements, so the recurring spend compounds instead of disappearing.

Yes — on every plan. You get full admin access for everyone you add (3 seats on Essentials, 8 on Managed, 25 on White-Glove). Hand off as much or as little to us as you want. Some clients run it themselves and ping us for occasional fixes; others never log in and let us drive. Same platform either way.

You get the same operators — we are an agency — but on a predictable monthly fee instead of a project quote with retainer politics. A traditional agency build for a comparable site is typically $15k–$50k up front, then a $1.5k–$5k/mo retainer, then $150–$250/hr for changes. Our equivalent is built in two weeks on a flat monthly that includes the platform, the SEO toolset, AI-visibility tracking, your strategy time, and your support hours. No retainer politics, no $250/hr invoices to change a phone number.

Included on every plan: the CMS, the full SEO toolset (page-level meta, redirects, structured data, internal-link rules, alt-tag sweep, sitemap/robots/llms.txt), the AI Content Audit, AI-visibility tracking across Google + ChatGPT + Claude + Perplexity + Gemini, your support hours, a named strategist, and (on Managed and White-Glove) hosting + SSL on our Vercel infrastructure. Not included — quoted separately: larger SEO/PPC engagements, new content production beyond your strategy hours, custom integrations, and design builds outside the core scope. Always quoted in writing first; never a surprise invoice.

Yes and yes. Month-to-month or annual — no multi-year lock-in, no early-termination fee, no clawback, no intro rate that triples in month four. Annual prepay perk depends on the tier: Essentials gets two months free, Managed gets a free 5-page build (a $3,500 value) instead of a cash discount, White-Glove gets a free 10-page build (a $7,500 value) instead of a cash discount. You own your content, your media, your redirects, and your domain. We’ll self-serve export content (HTML + JSON), media (raw files), and redirects (CSV) anytime. Full detail in What exactly can I export if I leave? below. If you leave, we keep the data 30 days for re-import then permanently delete it. That’s in the Terms.

What you can export, anytime: your written content (HTML + JSON), your media and image assets (raw files), and your redirect map (CSV). Your domain is always yours.

What export is not: a one-click, deployable copy of your live site, and not the Workspace CMS platform itself. The CMS, the admin, the dynamic features, and the hosting stay with Workspace. Export hands you your content and assets to take elsewhere and rebuild — not a turnkey clone of the running site.

This is standard for every managed platform (Squarespace, Wix, and Shopify work the same way). The difference: many managed-website shops won’t let you export at all. We always will.

Two weeks for a 5-page site, assuming you can turn around content feedback in 24–48 hours. Bigger scopes (15+ pages, e-commerce, migrations from another platform) run 3–4 weeks. We give you a fixed timeline on the strategy call — not “it depends.” If you’re migrating from another CMS, that scope — URL-level redirects, content port, schema rebuild, and SEO continuity — is part of the one-time build quote sized on your free strategy call, not a separate upcharge once you’re live.

That’s essentially the Essentials posture — you (or your team, or a contractor) drive the build, and we keep the platform humming, the SEO toolset working, and a strategist within reach for the moments you need one. You get the same admin, the same SEO + AI-visibility tools, and the same uptime infrastructure as our white-glove clients. The difference is who’s driving day-to-day. Many clients start here and graduate to Managed once they realize they’d rather hand it off than touch it weekly.