No circus
No six-month discovery phases. No surprise invoices. No meetings that exist to schedule meetings.
The process
No mysteries, no meetings about meetings. Here's the whole thing.
Three steps, one person, fixed numbers. This page exists so that you, and anyone you forward it to, can see exactly what happens to your website before agreeing to anything.
Step 01 · The assessment
First, facts. Free ones. No call required.
Every engagement starts the same way, because it should: with an inspection, not a pitch.
Send your website address; that's the whole ask. No fee, and no call required, though you're welcome to book one if you'd rather talk it through. We put your current site through the same examination a building inspector gives a house. How fast it really is on a phone, on real networks. What it's built on, and what that's costing you in hosting, maintenance, and patience. Where visitors are likely giving up. What must be preserved at all costs: your ranking on Google, the pages that earn, the look your customers know.
You get a short written report in plain language: here's the state of things, here's what a rebuild involves for your site specifically, here's the fixed quote. No fifty-page deck. No "it depends." If the honest answer is that you don't need us, and sometimes it is, the report says that too.
Forward this to: whoever guards the budget
The assessment costs nothing and the report is yours to keep, act on, or hand to another developer. The only thing at risk is thirty minutes.
Step 02 · The rebuild
This is where the horror stories usually happen. Here's why they won't.
Your site stays live. We build the new one alongside the old one and move over section by section. There is no terrifying switch-flip weekend.
Google never loses track of you. Every address on your old site gets a forwarding order to its new home. We call this the Ranking Preservation Map: built before anything moves, verified after, and watched for ninety days. It's a named deliverable in your report, not a vibe. Your search ranking is treated like the asset it is.
Your look survives, or improves with your sign-off. Atomic Wax is run by a designer. Nothing ships that makes your brand worse, and nothing changes without you approving it page by page.
The quote is fixed. It's based on the kinds of pages your site contains, not on how long we take. Most rebuilds for 10 to 30 page business sites land between $2,500 and $7,500; your report states your exact number. If we're slow, that's our problem. That's what a fixed quote means.
One honest warning, upfront. Every migration, done by anyone, causes a brief dip in Google impressions while the new site is re-crawled. It usually recovers within weeks, and the Ranking Preservation Map exists precisely to make sure it does. We say this now, before you're a client, because vendors who don't mention it turn a normal two-week curve into a panic.
Typical rebuilds run weeks, not months; your report includes the timeline for your site specifically. Before handover, we test everything (speed, links, phones, tablets) and hand you the report. Then the site, the design, and every word of content transfer to you. Fully. That's the deal.
Forward this to: your marketing person
The new site comes with a modern editing panel. Changing words, images, and pages is a login, not a support ticket. Your brand assets, your voice, your control.
Forward this to: the friend who "knows computers"
Static-first Astro build, served from Cloudflare's edge network, content in a typed database you own. No plugin stack, so the attack surface that needed patching simply doesn't exist. They'll approve.
Step 03 · The upkeep: Run, or take the keys
The part that surprises people.
Your new site has nothing to patch and nothing that rots. That doesn't mean nobody should be watching it. Most clients stay on Run, $199 a month, cancel any time:
- Edge hosting, SSL, backups and your editing login
- Self-monitoring: 32 automated checks on the live site, every day
- Automatic platform and security updates, applied and logged
- SEO and AI-search fixes applied as the checks find them, with a monthly change log
- Uptime and deploy-drift watch (we read the live site, not a status page)
- A person when the system can't fix it: Peter reviews every escalation
Or take the keys: $0/month. Everything is in your name; hosting on your own Cloudflare account runs $0 to $5 a month; you get a full export and a written handover. You'll hurt our feelings not at all.
Over three years, a typical WordPress setup runs $8,500 to $18,000+. Run is $7,164. Taking the keys is under $200. Run costs less than the low end of the WordPress range and includes monitoring and fixes that care plans don't.
The boundaries
What we don't do.
No hostages
Your domain, code and content are in your name from day one. If you stay on Run we host the site, and you can leave any time with a full export and a written handover. Take the keys and the hosting is yours too.
No pretending
We don't rebuild online stores from scratch: if you sell online, we'll tell you plainly where that work belongs (usually Shopify) and how it fits with what we build. And we don't take work we can't do extraordinarily well; the assessment is where we both find that out.
The fair question
"You're one person. What if you're hit by a bus?"
Ask it. Everyone should, especially anyone whose last developer simply vanished. Here's the honest answer: a finished Atomic Wax rebuild is designed to not need us. There's no plugin stack waiting for patches and no maintenance schedule. Run adds monitoring and fixes, but it isn't a dependency: if you take the keys, or if we disappeared the day after handover, your site would keep running, at full speed, indefinitely.
And when you eventually want changes, you're not stranded: the site is built on open, widely used technology, handed over fully documented, with every account and asset in your name. Any competent developer can take it from there. The reason your last developer's disappearance hurt is that the site needed them every month. This one doesn't need anyone to keep it alive. That's not a workaround for being a one-person studio; it's the whole architecture.
Forward this to: your operations manager
Continuity isn't a promise about one person's health. It's a property of the build: nothing to patch, everything documented, everything yours.
The next step
Start with the facts.
Free, no call required. A written plan and a fixed price at the end, whichever way you decide.