Comparison
A small-business website from an agency is typically quoted at €2,000 to €5,000 up front, delivered in four to eight weeks, plus a maintenance retainer. A DIY builder costs €15–30 a month and delivers whenever you find the weekend. Timbaly is €19 a month and delivers in minutes.
Price is the easy part of the comparison. The part that decides it is who does the ongoing findability work — because on most small-business sites, nobody does.
This page includes the cases where you should hire an agency. A comparison that only ever wins is a comparison nobody believes, and we would rather you find the honest version here than discover it after paying us.
Side by side
| Web agency | DIY builder | Timbaly | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up-front cost | €2,000–5,000 typical | €0 | €0 |
| Ongoing cost | Retainer, often €100–500 / month | €15–30 / month | €19 / month, per site |
| Time to live | 4–8 weeks | Your evenings, for weeks | Minutes |
| Who writes the copy | Them, or you if the budget was tight | You | Generated, then you edit |
| Technical SEO | Usually yes at launch | Partly, and manual | By code, on every publish |
| Written for AI answers | Rarely, and rarely priced | No | Built into every page |
| Who does it in month six | Them, if you kept paying | Nobody, in practice | Audit and plan, at your approval |
| Search Console in your name | Sometimes — ask before signing | You set it up yourself | Always yours |
| Custom design | Yes, that is the product | Template you adjust | Design system you adjust |
| Custom features | Yes | Plugins | No — pages, not applications |
| Somebody accountable | Yes, contractually | No | No — it is a tool |
Agency figures are the common range for a small-business brochure site in Western Europe, not a quote. Ask two agencies and you will get two numbers; ask what happens in month six and you will learn more than the price tells you.
The real difference
The problem with most small-business websites is not that they were built badly. It is that nothing happened to them after launch.
A site is delivered, everyone is pleased, and then the retainer gets cut in the second quarter because it is hard to point at what it bought. Two years later the pages are the same, the copy answers questions nobody asks any more, and three competitors have published thirty pages each.
That is the gap a platform is genuinely better at closing than a person, for an unglamorous reason: it does not forget and it does not get busy. The site scans itself, proposes concrete edits — rewrite this, merge those, redirect that, write the one that is missing — and you approve them in a few minutes. The queries that already bring impressions but sit in positions eight to thirty become the next pages to write, so what gets published follows a measurement rather than someone's hunch.
It is also the reason the free plan exists in the shape it does. You can see what the platform produces for your own business, on your own trade and city, before deciding whether it is worth €19 a month. The build takes about three minutes.
Against ourselves
A booking engine, a product configurator, a members' area, a live integration with your ERP or till system. Timbaly makes pages — well, and with the technical layer handled — but pages are not software. If the thing you need has state and logic, hire someone to build it.
If you are a design studio, a fashion label, an architecture practice, or anyone whose credibility rests on a distinctive visual identity, what you are buying from an agency is exactly the thing a design system deliberately standardises. Pay for the identity.
A retainer buys accountability: a name to call when something breaks, and someone whose job it is to care in month six. A platform cannot sell you that. If there is genuinely no one on your side who will click Approve, the honest answer is that a tool will not save you.
If you are an agency reading this and thinking the tool part could be ours and the judgement part yours — that is exactly the arrangement Timbaly is priced for. The agency page is here.
What you keep
The domain. The content on the pages. The Google Search Console property with its sixteen months of history — created inside your Google account, in your name, so leaving Timbaly does not cost you your search history.
The hosting and the generation stay with the platform, the same way an agency's CMS licence or hosting account would. If you leave, you take your domain and your text and rebuild elsewhere — which is the normal cost of leaving any platform, and worth knowing before you start.
Questions people ask before switching
In cash, yes, by a wide margin: €19 a month against €2,000–5,000 up front plus a retainer. What an agency sells that a platform does not is judgement — someone who argues with your brief, researches your market, and is contractually on the hook for the outcome. If you need that, the money is not wasted; it is buying a different thing.
Three cases: when the site is really an application, when brand design is the product you sell, and when nobody on your side will own the site after launch. Those are set out above in full rather than buried.
The domain, the content, and the Search Console property with its history. Not the hosting or the generation — those are the platform, and that is the ordinary cost of leaving any platform.
Import it rather than rebuilding: the content comes across, and 301 redirects are managed from the panel so old URLs keep pointing somewhere. Rankings depend on keeping URLs, content and internal links coherent — the tooling for that is there, but a migration is still a migration and worth doing deliberately. What the technical layer handles.
Yes, and several design decisions assume it. Pricing is per site, not per seat: twenty client sites are twenty independent subscriptions, each with its own panel and API key, cancellable one at a time. Details for agencies.
Three minutes on the free plan, no card, and you are looking at real pages about your trade and your city instead of a portfolio of somebody else's.