One person vs an agency: what you actually get

People ask me this all the time. "Should I hire you or should I go with an agency?" Honest answer: it depends on what you actually need. And I'll tell you when the answer isn't me.

I run a one-person studio. I build websites, automate the tedious stuff, and write code for small businesses that don't want to babysit a vendor. No account managers, no handoffs, no mystery. That setup isn't right for every situation, and pretending otherwise would be a waste of your time and mine.

What you get with an agency

Agencies have teams. A strategist, a designer, a developer, maybe a project manager whose job is scheduling the calls. If your project is genuinely large, that capacity matters. A 60-page rebrand with motion design, a custom platform with thousands of users, a marketing push that needs seven specialists working at once: that's agency territory.

You also get institutional continuity. If your main contact quits, the work continues. That's a real thing to want, and I won't talk you out of it.

The tradeoff is structure. You're paying for the overhead that keeps all those people coordinated. Retainers at mid-tier shops typically start around $3,800 a month. Projects come with a statement of work, revision limits, and approval gates. Changes cost money and take time. More often than not, you're talking to an account manager, not the person actually building your site.

None of that is bad. It's just how organizations work at scale.

What you get with one person

You talk directly to whoever is doing the work. When you email me, I read it. When we have a call, I'm the one who shows up already knowing the project. There is no translation layer.

That changes how fast decisions happen. If you need a section rewritten the day before launch because the tone felt wrong, it gets done. No ticket, no approval chain, no "I'll loop in the team." I just do it.

It also changes the price. Not because I undercut on quality, but because I don't have 11 people's salaries baked into the quote. A project that costs $18,000 at an agency might cost $6,500 with me, and the output can be the same or better because the person doing it actually cares whether you're happy.

What you don't get is parallel capacity. I can't run three full projects at once the way an agency can staff up. And if something happens to me, that's a real risk. I am one person.

The question nobody asks: who actually builds it

At a lot of agencies, especially at the $2,000 to $4,000 project range, your site is being built by a junior developer following a template. The senior people are on the bigger accounts. That's not a scandal. It's business math.

When you hire me, you get me. I make the decisions. I write the code. If something is wrong, I fix it, because there's nobody else to pass it to.

That matters more than it sounds. A good-enough website built carelessly costs more in the long run than a well-built one costs upfront. The first bill is lower; the second bill arrives later and hurts more.

When a solo person is the better call

You're a small business. You want a real site, not a template with your logo swapped in. You want someone who picks up the phone when something breaks. You want to stop explaining your business from scratch every time you have a question.

You might also want some automation baked in: a booking flow that sends reminders without you touching anything, a follow-up sequence that fires when someone fills out a form, a contact page that actually converts instead of just sitting there. That kind of work, where design and logic need to talk to each other, is where a solo generalist does well. If you're curious what that looks like for a real business, read how a plumber got his weekends back with a single automation.

Most of my clients are exactly this: service businesses with 1 to 12 people who need a site that works hard, costs a reasonable amount, and doesn't require a retainer to maintain.

When an agency makes more sense

If your project has more moving parts than one person can hold in their head at once, go with a team. A full e-commerce platform with custom inventory logic, a membership site with complex permissions, a brand rollout that needs print and video and digital simultaneously: that's not a one-person job, and I'll be the first to say so.

Same if you need someone available at all hours. I'm not a 24/7 support desk. If your business genuinely can't tolerate a 12-hour response window on a weekend, you need a team with shift coverage.

And if your internal stakeholder count is high, agencies are built for that. Review committees, brand compliance sign-offs, legal approvals: they have processes for it. I have patience, but there are real limits.

What this actually costs you, either way

Budget shapes everything. At agencies, even small regional ones, a real website project often lands between $8,000 and $22,000. Ongoing support is usually a monthly retainer on top of that.

With me, a solid small-business site typically runs $2,800 to $6,500 depending on complexity. Automations are quoted separately, usually as small standalone projects. If something breaks after launch, I fix it. I'm not going to leave you with a ticket number and a four-day SLA.

Neither number is outrageous if the result actually helps your business. The question is whether what you're buying is going to work the way it's supposed to. A slow, broken, or invisible website is not a deal at any price. If you want a concrete sense of what "works" means, see what happens when load time quietly costs you customers and 7 signs your site is already scaring people off.

If you have a project and you're not sure which direction makes sense, the fastest way to find out is to just describe it. Tell me what you have and I'll give you an honest read, including if I think you'd be better off with a team.