Bundles are a great way to sell services. They simplify what can otherwise be a confusing offering, and they’re good for business because they naturally create opportunities for upsell.
But in my experience, there’s a right way to sell bundles and a wrong way to sell bundles.
Bundles Work for Products, Not Bespoke Services
McDonald’s famously popularised the idea of a burger and fries as a standard set menu. It works because the product is consistent. You know exactly what you’re getting every time.
Web design isn’t like that.
I don’t believe bundles work for bespoke services like web design. Websites should be built to spec, based on the actual needs of the business or organisation. Yet I still see a lot of agencies selling “packages” based on page count: five pages, ten pages, twenty pages; as if that tells the whole story.
It doesn’t.
Page Count Is the Wrong Metric
A website’s complexity isn’t defined by how many pages it has. It’s defined by what the site needs to do.
As professional designers and developers, it’s our job to ask the right questions and recommend the right solutions based on requirements and budget. That might include:
- Lead generation
- Ecommerce
- Blogging
- Third-party integrations
- SEO
- Video
- Social media integration
- Landing pages
- Content distribution
- Paywalls
- And a lot more
Two websites with the same number of pages can have wildly different levels of complexity, build time, and cost. Packaging that into neat tiers just doesn’t make sense.
Where Packages Do Make Sense: Website Support
Where packages do work, and where we use them at Yazaroo, is website support.
Once a website is built, maintaining it is actually quite straightforward. It can be broken down into four areas:
- Hosting
- Software updates
- Backups
- Changes
Most of this can be automated. Updates, backups, and hosting are handled via cron jobs. Downtime monitoring is handled by third-party tools that plug into the system.
This consistency is exactly why support can be packaged.
Our Hosting Package
We offer hosting for £20 + VAT.
That includes the core hosting setup, with the option to scale server space and resources as needed. SSL certificates are free to us, so we pass them on for free.
This is our most basic package. There’s some initial setup time, but once it’s running, it requires very little management. It doesn’t include website updates, and if the site goes offline, which happens more often than people expect, you’d pay us separately to get it back up and running.
Our Website Support Package
Our second package is WordPress Support for £99 + VAT.
Hosting is included because it’s simply easier for us to support sites we host ourselves. We have full control of the server environment and cPanel, which makes everything faster and more reliable.
What clients are really paying for here is time.
They get one hour per month, which covers:
- Software updates
- Security
- Daily and offsite backups
- Small changes to the site
They’re essentially buying peace of mind and an hour of access to us each month.
Why This Package Actually Works
For most businesses, this setup is ideal.
They can focus on running their business, knowing their website is being looked after properly. Updates don’t feel like a chore, they’re just an email away. That’s why this works as a package.
It also works because, regardless of website size or type, support involves broadly the same tasks. The only real variable is time.
For most people, an hour a month is about right. Some need more time, some need higher-spec servers, and they pay accordingly. The package provides a sensible baseline, not a one-size-fits-all web build pretending to be bespoke.
And that’s the difference.
