Frequently asked questions

It depends on scope, but our public pricing gives you the ranges: landing pages start at $1,500, marketing sites at $4,500, and full custom builds at $20,000. Hourly work runs $40 to $95 per hour. Pricing is milestone-based, so you pay as agreed stages ship rather than everything up front.

Our engagements ship in 4 to 12 weeks. A landing page sits at the fast end, a marketing site in the middle, and a full custom build takes the longest. The most common delay is not development, it is waiting on content and feedback, so we schedule both into the plan from day one.

At Lumien: discovery and planning, UX and page design, the WordPress or Next.js build, SEO foundations (metadata, schema, redirects, XML sitemap), QA across devices, and training for your team with written handoff documentation. Hosting and ongoing maintenance are scoped separately so you only pay for what you actually use.

If your needs are standard (services, about, contact, a few landing pages), a well-customized template is often the right call, and we will tell you so. Custom builds earn their cost when you need integrations, unusual workflows, or performance a theme cannot deliver. The honest answer depends on what the site has to do, not on what is more profitable to sell you.

You do. Full ownership of the site, code, content, and accounts transfers to you on final payment, and everything lives in accounts registered to your business. If you leave us later, you take the whole site with you.

Yes, through care plans that start at $99 per month and cover updates, backups, security monitoring, and small fixes. A care plan is optional, not a lock-in: the site is built so your own team can run it. Larger changes are billed at our published hourly rate of $40 to $95.

It depends on scope, but our pricing is public: marketing sites start at $4,500, full custom builds at $20,000, and most ecommerce projects scope between those anchors, with hourly work at $40-95. Catalog size, migrations, third-party integrations and custom checkout logic are what move the number. You get a written proposal with milestone-based pricing within 3 business days, so the cost is fixed before work starts.

Neither wins universally; it depends on who runs the store after launch. Shopify is better when you want hosting, security and updates handled for you and the fastest path to launch. WooCommerce is better when the store lives inside a content-heavy WordPress site or needs custom checkout or B2B logic. We recommend one in writing before you commit, and we will say so if the honest answer is the cheaper option.

Our engagements ship in 4-12 weeks. A store on a customized theme with a small, clean catalog lands at the short end; a replatform with a large catalog, integrations or a product configurator takes the long end. The proposal states the timeline per milestone, so you always know where the project stands.

Yes. A migration moves products, customers, order history and URLs, and we treat the 1:1 redirect map and a staging crawl as launch gates so rankings and bookmarked links survive the switch. How long it takes depends mostly on catalog size and how clean your current data is, which we assess before quoting.

Yes, that is part of every build, not an add-on. We configure your payment providers, shipping rates and tax rules, then test them with real checkout scenarios before launch. For taxes we set up the rules and rates and recommend your accountant signs off, because tax advice is their job, not ours.

Yes. The same team offers Google Ads management from $1,000/mo and ecommerce email marketing, so the people who built your conversion tracking are the ones spending against it. Bundling is optional: the store build stands on its own, and you own every account and platform login either way.

PPC (pay per click) management is the ongoing work of running paid ad campaigns: choosing keywords, writing ads, setting bids and budgets, tracking conversions, and adjusting all of it based on what the data shows. On Google Ads, good management is mostly disciplined weekly maintenance, not a one-time setup that gets left to run itself.

Our management fee starts at $1,000 per month, separate from your ad spend, which goes directly to Google on your own card. The fee scales with the number of campaigns, products, and markets we manage. We publish the full price list on our pricing page so you can compare before you ever talk to us.

It depends on your industry's cost per click and how many clicks it typically takes to produce a lead or sale, so any universal number would be a guess. During the proposal we check real cost data for your actual keywords and tell you the minimum monthly spend at which the math can work. If that number does not make sense for your margins, we say so and suggest a different channel.

Traffic starts within days of launch, but judgment should wait longer. The first weeks mostly generate the conversion data that everything afterward is tuned against, so early numbers are noisy by nature. We ask clients to evaluate the account on a full quarter rather than the first invoice.

No long lock-ins. We ask for enough initial runway to get through the learning phase, because judging paid search on its first few weeks punishes the wrong things. After that, the engagement runs month to month, and you can leave with your account, your data, and your full history intact.

You do, without exception. We build campaigns in an account registered to your business, with billing on your card, and we work through manager access. If we ever part ways, you remove our access and keep everything: campaigns, conversion data, and account history.

It depends on platform count, post volume, and whether paid ads are included. At Lumien, packages are scoped from a published $40-95/hr rate, and paid social ads management starts at $1,000/mo on top of the ad budget you pay the platforms. You get a written proposal with the exact monthly figure within 3 business days.

A full package covers five things: content strategy and a monthly calendar, post creation (design, copy, and short video edits), scheduling and publishing, community management for comments and DMs, and a monthly report. Paid ad campaigns are a separate, clearly priced line item. If a quote does not itemize these, ask what was left out.

Social media management is the ongoing work of planning, creating, publishing, and monitoring a business's social media content, plus responding to the people who engage with it. For a small business, it usually means hiring an outside team to run the calendar so posting actually happens every week instead of whenever someone finds time.

Wherever your customers already spend attention, and fewer places than you think. One or two platforms done consistently beat four done badly: restaurants, bars, and retail usually live on Instagram and Facebook, while B2B services get more from LinkedIn. We recommend a platform mix in the proposal after looking at your audience, not before.

Content packages are scoped monthly, but we are honest that social media takes time to judge: expect roughly a quarter of consistent posting before the reporting means anything. Any minimum term we ask for is stated in the written proposal with the reason behind it, never buried in fine print.

Not by default. Organic packages cover content, publishing, community management, and reporting. Paid campaign management is a separate service starting at $1,000/mo, plus the ad budget you pay the platforms directly. When you run both with us, we coordinate them so ads promote content that already proved itself organically.

Workflow automation is software that runs a multi-step process for you: a trigger (say, a new form submission) starts a series of actions (create the CRM contact, notify sales, send a confirmation) that execute the same way every time. Tools like Make.com and Zapier let you build these without writing custom code. A good workflow also plans for failure: it retries, alerts a human, and logs what happened.

Business process automation applies the same idea to a whole process rather than a single task: quote to invoice, lead to booked job, order to fulfillment. For a small business it mostly means connecting the tools you already use so data moves between them without anyone retyping it. Workflow automation is the mechanism; business process automation is the goal.

Make.com (formerly Integromat) is a visual automation platform where you build scenarios that connect your apps and move data between them. It is stronger than most alternatives at branching logic, loops, and data transformation, and its pricing tends to be friendlier at high monthly volume. The trade-off is a steeper learning curve, which is why businesses often hire a consultant to build and document scenarios.

The usual candidates are lead capture and routing, follow-up emails, invoicing and payment reminders, appointment confirmations, review requests, weekly reporting, and keeping customer data in sync across tools. A simple test: if someone does the same steps more than a few times a week, it is worth pricing an automation. Rare, judgment-heavy tasks are usually cheaper to leave with a person.

At Lumien, automation starts at $750 per workflow, and ongoing changes bill at $40 to $95 per hour. The price rises with the number of apps and steps, custom API work, and how much data cleanup is needed before the workflow can run reliably. You also pay the platform subscription (Make.com or Zapier) directly. We quote a fixed, milestone-based price in a written proposal within 3 business days.

It depends on complexity and volume. Zapier has the biggest app catalog and is the easiest to maintain in-house, so it wins for short, linear workflows. Make.com handles branching, loops, and heavy volume better, and usually costs less as usage grows. If you already pay for one and it does the job, we will say so rather than migrate you.

An AI chatbot is software that uses a large language model, such as ChatGPT or Claude, to answer questions in natural language based on your business data. Unlike older rule-based bots, it does not follow a fixed script, so it can handle questions nobody anticipated. The tradeoff is that it needs guardrails, testing, and monitoring to stay accurate.

Our AI chatbot development services start at $4,000 for a scoped bot with one primary data source, guardrails, and a monitoring dashboard. The final price depends on how many data sources the bot reads, how many systems it connects to, and any compliance requirements. We price by milestone and send a written proposal within 3 business days.

The build has four steps: define the questions it must answer, connect it to your real content, set guardrails and a human handoff, then test it against real questions before launch. Building it yourself is reasonable when there is one data source, low stakes, and a technical person to own it. Hire help when the bot is customer facing, touches several systems, or nobody will monitor its accuracy and spend after launch.

Yes. The OpenAI and Anthropic APIs let us connect a model to your website, CRM, Slack, or Google Sheets. We run our own Claude assistant on top of our monday.com CRM, so we build these integrations the same way we built them for ourselves. The practical limit is usually the quality of your data, not the API.

AI integration is the work of connecting AI models to the software your business already runs: your website, CRM, help desk, or spreadsheets. It covers choosing the model, wiring it to your data, setting guardrails, and monitoring cost and quality. A chatbot is one common output; document processing and automated report drafting are others.

Every system we ship includes per-feature usage limits, the smallest model that does each job, and a dashboard that shows cost per day rather than per invoice. If you already run AI tools, we offer a standalone spend audit that reviews usage logs, maps cost to features, and sets caps and alerts. Uncapped API keys and default model choices are where overspend usually hides.