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Will a new website pay for itself?

Put in your own traffic, your own conversion rate and your own average job value. This works out how long one of our four CAD brackets takes to pay back — using your numbers, not ours.

The arithmetic

Four multiplications and one division

Written out in full below, so you can do it on paper.

Put your own numbers in

visitors

Take this from your analytics rather than from memory. If you have no analytics installed, that is itself the finding — you are making decisions about a shop window you cannot see through, and fixing the measurement is cheaper than fixing the site.

%

Divide last month's enquiries by last month's visitors and multiply by a hundred. Most small-business sites sit somewhere low single digits; if yours is under one percent and your traffic is real, the site is the bottleneck rather than the marketing.

CAD

Use the average value of a job or an order, not your best month. If a customer normally comes back, use what they are worth over a year rather than on the first visit — that is the number that should be driving what you are willing to spend.

%

This one is deliberately yours to choose. We have not published a figure for what a rebuild does to a conversion rate, because we have not measured one across enough sites to defend it, and a number invented for a calculator is worse than no number. Try a modest improvement first and see whether the payback still makes sense.

Enter your numbers above and this fills in.

With JavaScript off, the arithmetic is written out under “The arithmetic, written out” below — it is four multiplications and one division, and you can do it on paper.

The price list

What are the four CAD brackets this tool uses?

These are the same figures as the published price list, read from the same file that renders it. A fixed price is confirmed in writing before any work begins.

DevShutter web development brackets, in Canadian dollars. Billing is always CAD.
BracketPrice (CAD)What it buys
Starter $999 A polished, single-purpose site to plant your flag online — fast and affordably.
Launch $2,400 A sharp, fast site to get you online and converting.
Growth $4,900 The sweet spot — a bigger site built to scale with you.
Signature $9,900+ A one-off flagship build with everything turned on.

The arithmetic, written out

Monthly customers are your visitors multiplied by your conversion rate. Monthly revenue is that figure multiplied by what a customer is worth. The tool works that out twice — once at your current conversion rate and once at the rate you chose to model — and the difference between them is the monthly gain. Divide the cost of a bracket by that monthly gain and you have the number of months before the build has paid for itself.

That is the whole formula. There is no industry multiplier, no benchmark pulled from a report you cannot check, and no assumption baked in where you cannot see it. Every input is yours and the only figures we contribute are the four bracket prices, which are read from our published price list.

Why we will not fill in the improvement for you

Every agency calculator we have used arrives pre-loaded with a flattering uplift, and that single pre-filled field is doing all the persuading. We have left it to you on purpose. If you want a defensible starting point, look at what is actually broken on your current site first — our nine-point audit is free and will tell you whether speed, structure or contact routing is losing the enquiry — and then model an improvement that matches the size of the problem you found.

A payback period that only works at a heroic conversion rate is a payback period that does not work. If the honest number is uncomfortable, that is useful information, and it usually means the first move is a smaller one.

What this cannot tell you

It cannot tell you whether the extra customers exist. If your traffic is small, the fastest return is almost always more of the right visitors rather than a higher conversion rate on the few you have, and no amount of design fixes an empty room. It also cannot account for the customers you keep rather than win, or for the enquiries you currently lose because nobody answers them for three days.

Treat the result as a floor for the conversation rather than a forecast. It is the arithmetic you would do on the back of an envelope, done consistently and shown to you rather than hidden, which is all a calculator on a studio website should honestly claim to be.

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