Pro Packages
Add-On Features
Technical Additions
Design Options
A Cost Comparison

The costs depend entirely on what you need, there is something for everyone. Essentially there are two types of costs: Initial Setup and Ongoing Monthly. Initial Setup costs cover the project management, design and development expenses associated with creating a custom website that fits your unique needs, in terms of custom design and functionality. The Ongoing Monthly costs cover server and email hosting, software licensing, our committed support, upgrades and bug fixes, and the various extra functionality that you subscribe to on a monthly basis.

So Initial Setup is determined by your choice of Design Options, and Ongoing Monthly is determined by your choice of Gutensite Version and Packages. You can mix and match to find the perfect combination for you. So let us never hear again those too famous words, "We are on a tight budget, so what sort of a deal can you give us." We don't give deals, but we do provide high quality options for every budget.

Free Lite Version

If you don't want to pay a penny, the Free Lite Version is what you are looking for. Your site will be built and managed with our excellent CMS (Content Management System), with most of the extra upgrade features that Professional Version clients have to pay for. You will have free hosting, and you may use any of our Free Design Skins. What you don't get is private hosting (which means you don't have your own domain name or email accounts), and you don't get free customer support (but you can use our community Forums once they launch, and our help tools and tutorials).

But the good news is, you don't pay a thing for the initial setup or ongoing monthly costs, because we are offering our CMS for free as a promotional gimmick to try to raise awareness of our product and services. We hope people will try us out for free, and then like us so much that they'll upgrade to the Professional Version, or at the very least recommend us to a friend.

Professional Version

The Free Lite Version is nice, but it just isn't going to be enough for most professional organizations. We know that, but we hope by sharing it with a broader audience, more people will become aware of Gutensite and choose to partner with us on a professional level.

The Professional Version of course includes VPS (Virtual Private Hosting), private domains, unlimited email accounts, our excellent CMS, and of course our committed support. But there are are different packages available, to provide price points and features that appeal to different types of people. With the Professional Version, you can control your Initial Setup costs by choosing the right Design Option for you. And then you control your Ongoing Monthly costs by choosing the right Pro Package. In general though they all include,

 

  • Fully functional website ready for use immediately
  • Free starter designs
  • Domain purchasing and transfer help
  • All the basic prebuilt content pages needed for a website, control of administrative accounts, creation of unlimited custom pages with an HTML Editor, etc.
    Read More About Included Features
  • Virtual Private Hosting (VPS) with 1GB of server space and 5GB of bandwidth.
  • Unlimited Email Accounts
  • Free CMS upgrades and bug fixes
  • Technology Licensing Fees
  • Committed Support

Pro packages

"Look Ma No Hands": $35/mo

This is a streamlined version for people that want the advantages of private hosting, but don't want to pay for full service. It includes a standard Gutensite, with hosting, email accounts, hosting support (no Gutensite training or support) and core CMS functionality, plus extra functionality including: accounts, calendar, community, customer, faq, investment, multimedia, portfolio, profiles pages, project, service, slideshows, and team oriented features. Additional paid upgrades are available. This package allows the use of free templates only, sorry you have to upgrade if you want a custom design. It's for geeks that think support is for sissies and prefer to figure things out on their own or find help on the forums.

 

General Tso: $80/mo

This is the general package we recommend for most businesses. It includes a standard Gutensite, with hosting, email accounts, and customer support, plus extra functionality including: accounts, billing, calendar, client, community, customer, faq, investment, multimedia, portfolio, profile pages, project, service, slideshows, and team oriented features. Additional upgrades are available, e.g. Store for $25/mo, Gutenshare Intranet $25/mo, etc.

 

Non-Profit: $70/mo

This is a package designed specifically with non-profits in mind. We wanted to offer as much as possible for the best price as our way of supporting the great work that non-profits do in our society. It includes a standard Gutensite, with hosting, email accounts, and customer support, plus all the basic functionality that is useful to non-profits including: accounts, calendar, community, faq, investment, multimedia, profile pages, portfolio, slideshows, and team oriented features, etc. In addition it includes most of our extra upgrades for free: donations module, Gutenshare Intranet, etc. Additional paid upgrades are available for things like the Store.

 

Realtor: $80/mo

Gutensite actually began as an idea when we did our first realtor website for the Maryellen Curtis of Burlingame CA. In celebration of our humble beginnings, we have a special package just for realtors. It includes a standard Gutensite, with hosting, email accounts, and customer support, plus extra functionality that matters to realtors, including: accounts, calendar, community, customer, faq, investment, multimedia, portfolio, profile pages, property, real estate, service directories, and team oriented features. Additional upgrades available (and recommended), e.g. Live Local MLS for $35/mo, etc. 

MLS Access for Realtors: $35/mo

E-Commerce Store: $25/mo

Donations: $10/mo

Gutenshare (intranet): $25/mo

SendStudio Email Marketing: starting at $15/mo for 2,500 emails

Additional functionality is available, ask us about your particular site. And if we don't offer the functionality you need, we are always available to custom develop new features for you.

Extra Storage Space

  • 1GB Chunks: $3/mo
  • 5GB Chunks: $10/mo
  • 10GB Chunks: $15/mo
  • 50GB Chunks: $40/mo
  • 100GB Chunks: $60/mo
  • 200GB Chunks: $100/mo
  • More: contact us for special pricing.

Extra Bandwidth

  • 5GB Chunks: $10/mo
  • 10GB Chunks: $18/mo
  • 50GB Chunks: $75/mo
  • 100GB Chunks: $125/mo
  • 200GB Chunks: $200/mo
  • More: contact us for special pricing.

SSL Certificates

  • 1 Year Geotrust Certificate: $150/yr
  • 2 Year Geotrust Certificate: $125/yr

Custom Design

Costs will vary depending on the complexity and functionality of your project, how much animation/interactivity you want, how easy you are to please, how many revisions are required, etc. But as a general starting point, we estimate about $3,500 for a nicely-designed medium-sized website with a little bit of motion graphics.

This basic cost includes a fully designed site, which results from designing the home page and the look of all the secondary pages (the shell that surrounds your content) as well as the styles that govern the pages of your site. We have created some standard layout for the body content of basic pages and they work well for most sites. This is another way that members of the Gutensite community save money. But occasionally you may have individual pages that need extra attention, and we are happy to custom design them to fit your needs on a case by case basis. Usually we estimate about $250 per page.

See examples of Custom Designs

If you are a small business or organization and you recognize the need for professional design, but can't yet afford the work required, that's okay too. Our Hybrid or Free Skin options might be helpful.

Hybrid Designs

Our growing Hybrid Design Library showcases some fantastic designs that never made it to production, for one reason or another, but which we feel deserve their place in the sun. You can look at these designs and ask us to use them as a starting point for your design. If you decide you only need to change a couple things to make it your own, you can just pay for a couple hours of custom design work, thereby saving you about half of the regular custom design and install costs above.

See examples of Hybrid Designs

Free Skins

Our Free Skins Library is also growing, but even now it offers clients some wonderful design options that can help you setup a professional site on a budget. The Free Skins allow customization through the CMS over key elements, which really help them take on an identity of their own. Using the Free Skins reduces your startup costs to zero. If you find that you have a little money in your budget, you can request any amount of customization to these Free Designs as well, and only pay for the modifications you desire.

See examples of Free Design Skins

  Setup Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 Year 5 5-Year Total
GUTENSITE LITE $0 $0 $0 $0 $0 $0 $0
GUTENSITE HYBRID $1,5001 $9602 $960 $960 $960 $960 $6,300
GUTENSITE CUSTOM $3,500 3 $960 2 $960 $960 $960 $960 $8,300
INDEPENDENT GROUND UP $25,000 4 $2,000 5 $2,000 $2,000 $2,000 $2,000 $35,000
(1) Reflects an estimate cost for installing a hybrid design (savings from bypassing the design phase).
(2) Reflects our General Tso Package at $80 per month. The "Look Ma No Hands" Package would reduce your yearly operating costs by $540/yr, reducing the 5 year total by $2,100.
(3) Reflects average custom design costs. Of course, there are no setup costs associated with our free templates.
(4) $25,000 is a general estimate of what it would cost to build a website, with a Content Management System and all the functionality you will get with your Gutensite, from the ground up. This is a very conservative estimate, based on our experience building sites just like this. Custom development is intricate and time consuming, and when you add up the hours the costs are simply astounding. This is why development projects for small businesses usually opt to start with an existing CMS, which can save a lot of the basic work. The budget can then be spent on customization. The problem is, commercial CMS's can be expensive, and together with free Open Source solutions, both are often not easily customizable, which results in high costs for anyone that wants to do anything beyond the basic default setup. Our Gutensite CMS was built as a flexible framework, that allows us to easily customize every aspect of a site, for a fraction of the cost of normal custom development.
(5) Average Maintenance, support, and server costs for an independent site. $2,000 is a general estimate of the costs associated with running an independent CMS driven website, assuming very minimal support needs. A traditional HTML website, which requires a developer to implement every text change on your site, would be considerably higher. Our estimate is assuming a conservative $15/mo for hosting ($168/yr), and a mere 2 hours of support and development costs a month (at a modest $75/hr). If you are running an independent site, you will need to be the webmaster (or hire someone to function in this capacity which would cost extra). The webmaster will need to interface with the server and email support at the hosting company, troubleshoot problems with the site or figure out how to use the features of the CMS, apply upgrades and security patches to your CMS when necessary, etc. If you are on your own, and you need help, the support costs could easily exceed this estimate.