95+Lighthouse, on a South African mobile network
Fast by construction.
No plugin sprawl, no page builder, no bloat. Hand-built static pages that score 95+ on Lighthouse and load in under a second on mobile data.
What is included in a website build?
A DoubleDown AI website is a fast, mobile-first, SEO-ready site built for a South African business, with the copy, the structure and the search markup done as part of the build. You pay one build fee and a flat monthly for hosting; there is no separate maintenance retainer.
Builds start at R2 000 once off, with hosting at R250 a month. It goes live in 2 to 30 days.
The product
Built by hand.
Fast on a phone.
Static, hand-built, one build fee. Every page is laid out to move a visitor, not to look busy — and it loads in under a second on a South African network.
Karoo Outdoor CoGearGuidesStockistsContactShop the range
Gear for the road less tarred.
Rooftop tents, fridges and recovery kit, tested on the roads out of Upington. Delivered anywhere in South Africa.
Shop the rangeRooftop tentsFrom the Kalahari to the Cape
Fridges12 V, tested to 45 °C
RecoveryBoards, straps, shackles
Karoo Outdoor CoGearGuidesStockistsContactShop the range
Gear for the road less tarred.
Rooftop tents, fridges and recovery kit, tested on the roads out of Upington. Delivered anywhere in South Africa.
Shop the rangeRooftop tentsFrom the Kalahari to the Cape
Fridges12 V, tested to 45 °C
RecoveryBoards, straps, shackles
- 2 to 30 daysto live
- 340%Average lift in form submissions
- From R2 000once-off build
- POPIAaligned by design
Not WordPress bloat. Not a Wix template.
Fast, mobile-native, SEO-ready sites built for South African business. One build fee, then a flat monthly for hosting.
What you get
Premium websites that actually sell.
The promiseabove the fold
Proof — real work, real numbersscreen two
The offer and what it costsscreen three
One clear call to actionevery screen
Laid out to convert.
Hero, proof, offer, objection, call to action — in that order, on every screen size, designed at 390 px first because that is where your customers are.
Do you deliver to Upington?Yes — R95, two to three days. Want me to check stock on the 65 l fridge?
Chatbot-ready from day one.
Your DoubleDown AI chatbot drops straight in — one line, no redesign — so the site answers questions the day it goes live.
Everything else it does.
- Fast by construction Static, hand-built, no plugin sprawl. Lighthouse 95+ and sub-second loads on South African mobile networks.
- Mobile-native, not mobile-adapted Designed at 390px first, because that is where your customers actually are.
- Conversion-focused structure Hero, proof, offer, objection, call to action — the page is laid out to move a visitor, not to look busy.
- SEO-ready from day one Semantic markup, schema, sitemaps, fast Core Web Vitals and city-level SEO pages if you sell locally.
- Chatbot-ready Your DoubleDown AI chatbot drops straight in — one line, no redesign.
- POPIA-aligned + hosted by us Privacy policy, cookie handling and data rights pages included. Our hosting keeps it live, backed up and patched.
How it goes live
Two days.
Or thirty.
Most sites go live in 2 to 30 days, depending on how many pages you need and how fast the content and approvals come back. Starter builds are usually done inside a week.
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01 Day 0
We scope it
One conversation about what the site must do, how many pages, and what you already have. You get a fixed price before anything starts.
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02 Day 1–5
We design it
A real design for your business, not a template with your logo dropped in. You see it before a line of code is written.
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03 Day 3–20
We build it
Hand-built, static and fast. Lighthouse 95+, sub-second loads, mobile-first at 390px.
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04 Day 5–30
We launch it
Domain, hosting, SSL, analytics and search console — all set up and handed over.
Pricing
Pick a plan.
Change it whenever.
One-off build fee plus R250 a month hosting. Scoped with you before anything is built.
Starter
R2 000
One-off build · R250/mo hosting
- Landing page
- Mobile-native
- Contact form
- Basic SEO
- Hosting included
Intermediate
R3 500
One-off build · R250/mo hosting
- Up to 5 pages
- Custom design
- Blog-ready
- Full SEO setup
- Hosting included
Most popular
Pro
R5 500
One-off build · R250/mo hosting
- Up to 10 pages
- Bespoke design + motion
- CMS-lite editing
- Advanced SEO
- Hosting included
Pro+
R9 000
One-off build · R250/mo hosting
- Up to 20 pages
- Full bespoke design
- Integrations
- City SEO pages
- Hosting included
WebCommerce
R10 500
One-off build · R250/mo hosting
- Full online store
- PayFast + Yoco checkout
- Product + stock management
- Order automation
- Hosting included
Enterprise
fromR14 500
One-off build · R250/mo hosting
- Unlimited scope
- Custom platform work
- Dedicated build team
- SLA support
- Hosting included
Website Design
Website Design
answered.
Published SA agency surveys put it between roughly R1,990 and R100,000, with most businesses paying R15,000 to R50,000 for a professional build in 2026. Ours runs from R2,000 for a starter build to R14,500 at the top of the range, once-off, then a flat R250 a month for hosting. Our pricing page carries the complete price list — there is no "it depends" and no discovery call required to find out.
Included: the design, the build, the copy formatting, mobile optimisation, basic on-page SEO, a contact form, an SSL certificate, hosting, backups, security updates and a POPIA privacy policy. Not included unless you ask: photography, logo design, long-form copywriting, and ongoing content updates beyond the occasional small change. Add-ons like a chatbot, a booking system or invoicing are separate products with their own pricing.
With us, R250 a month, flat — hosting, SSL, backups, security updates and monitoring included. Reported figures put the typical South African business site at R1,500 to R5,000 a month once hosting, domain, SSL, plugin licences, patching and maintenance are added up. That gap exists because we build without a plugin stack, so there is nothing to license and very little to break.
Yes, completely, from day one. The files, the design, the content and the domain are yours. We do not register domains in our own name and we do not build on a proprietary platform you cannot leave. If you go elsewhere, you go with a working website and we hand everything over without an argument.
Yes, any time, and we will help. We hand over the files, the DNS details and anything else your new provider needs. A web designer who makes this difficult is telling you something about how they keep clients.
Two to thirty days depending on the tier — a landing page at the fast end, a WebCommerce or Enterprise build at the other. This is the one product we do not deliver in thirty minutes, because a website is a build rather than a deployment. The clock starts when we have your content and your approval on the direction.
We can work with WordPress if you already have it, but we do not recommend starting there. We hand-build in clean HTML and CSS with no page builder and no plugin stack, which is why our sites load fast and cost R250 a month to run instead of R1,500. WordPress is the single most common reason an SA business site is slow and expensive to maintain.
A website builder is genuinely good if you want to build and maintain the site yourself — and if that is you, use one. The trade is your time, a subscription that never ends, a slower site, and a design constrained by the template. We build it, you own it, and the ongoing cost is R250 a month.
The technical foundation is included and it is the part most builds get wrong: semantic markup, a clean heading structure, proper metadata, structured data, a sitemap, fast Core Web Vitals and mobile-first rendering. That makes the site rankable. Ranking for competitive terms also needs content and time, which is ongoing work rather than something a build can promise.
Not shipping what you do not need. No page builder, no jQuery stack, no theme framework, self-hosted fonts instead of third-party requests, images sized and compressed properly, and CSS that is written rather than generated. It is measurable — run this site through PageSpeed Insights and then run the last quote you received.
We format and structure what you give us, and we will tighten headings and calls to action. Full copywriting from scratch is a separate scope — tell us at quoting stage and we will price it. Supplying your own words usually produces a better site, because you know how you talk about the work.
Yes, and it is a large part of what we do. A redesign is usually better value than a rebuild from zero because the content, the structure and the search history already exist. We keep the URLs that are earning traffic and redirect the ones that are not, so a redesign does not cost you your rankings.
Yes — PayFast, and other South African gateways where you already have a merchant account. Full online stores are the WebCommerce tier, which includes a product catalogue, cart, checkout and order handling.
Yes, and this is where a website from us differs from one from a design studio. A website chatbot answers visitors in eleven languages, and a booking system fills your calendar from the same conversation. Both are separate products with their own pricing and both drop into a site we built without a rebuild.
The long version What a website costs, and what it costs to keep. And how we compare.
What a website costs, and what it costs to keep.
Short version: the whole industry publishes the build price and goes quiet about the next twelve months.
How much does a website cost in South Africa?
Published SA agency surveys put website design cost in South Africa anywhere between about R1,990 and R100,000, with most businesses paying R15,000 to R50,000 for a professional build in 2026. A one-page site averages around R3,765 and a five-page site around R6,633, with online stores and corporate builds well above that. Those are third-party figures.
Ours: from R2,000 for a starter build up to R14,500 at the top of the range, once-off, then a flat R250 a month. Our pricing page carries the complete list of our website design prices — there is no discovery call required to find out what it costs. We publish the numbers because "it depends" is how this industry avoids the question, and because a business that cannot estimate the cost never enquires at all.
What does it cost to run a website — the part nobody publishes
Reported figures put the ongoing cost of running a typical South African business site at R1,500 to R5,000 a month once you add website hosting, a domain, an SSL certificate, backups, plugin licences, security patching and website maintenance. That is the line item that appears in month two, after the invoice for the build has been paid.
Ours is R250 a month, flat, and it includes the hosting, the SSL, the backups, the security updates and the monitoring. On the monthly website package vs once off build question: those R499 to R799 a month packages are heavily advertised, and after four to six months they cost more than a once-off build — and you usually do not own the result. We would rather you did the arithmetic than discover it in month seven.
Do I own my website?
Yes. Completely, from day one, and this is the question the industry least likes being asked. The files, the design, the content and the domain are yours. Can i move my website to another host — yes, and we hand over everything to whoever you ask us to, without a conversation about it.
We do not build sites that only we can edit, we do not register your domain in our own name, and there is no proprietary platform holding your business hostage. If you leave, you leave with a working website. That is not generosity; it is the minimum, and the fact that it needs saying tells you something about the category.
What you get for a price at the lower end
A low number in web design usually means a template mill, so here is what is actually behind ours. We hand-build in clean HTML and CSS — no page builder, no plugin stack, no theme that loads two megabytes to render a heading. That is why it costs less to build and far less to run: there is nothing to license and almost nothing to break.
Every site is fast loading and measured on real core web vitals, mobile friendly first because that is where South African traffic is, and seo friendly in the way that matters — semantic markup, a sane heading structure, proper metadata, structured data and a sitemap. The site you are reading is built the same way; run it through PageSpeed Insights before you enquire.
On WordPress: we can work with it if you already have it, but we do not recommend starting there. It is the reason most SA business sites are slow and cost R1,500 a month to maintain. On Wix, Squarespace and every other website builder — they are genuinely good if you want to build and maintain it yourself. If you would rather not, that is what we are for.
A business website, and what can be bolted onto it
We build the whole range: a landing page design for a campaign, a business website for a service firm, an ecommerce website on our WebCommerce tier, or a website redesign when the site you have is losing you work. Every website package includes the build, the hosting, an ssl certificate, backups and a POPIA privacy policy. PayFast for card payments where you need it.
What an agency cannot usually add afterwards, we can: a website with a chatbot answering visitors in eleven languages (see website chatbot), a website with a booking system that fills your diary (see booking systems), or quoting and invoicing behind it. As a small business website design studio in South Africa we work remotely from Vanderbijlpark with clients in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban.
One thing to be clear about: this is the one product we do not deliver in thirty minutes. A real web designer and real website development takes two to thirty days depending on the tier, because a website is a build and not a deployment.
The honest comparison
Three ways to solve this.
Here is all three.
No brand names and no competitor prices — those go stale and we would be quoting somebody else’s numbers. This is the shape of each option.
| Doing it yourself | An overseas platform | DoubleDown AI | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it costs | Your team's time | Typically billed in US dollars | From R2 000 once off, in rands |
| How it starts | A template site somebody in the office maintains | You configure the platform yourself | We build it, trained on your business |
| Time to live | However long it keeps taking | Days of setup, done by you | 2 to 30 days |
| South African languages | Whatever your staff speak | Rarely tuned for South African phrasing | All 11 official languages |
| POPIA | Your responsibility | Usually governed by foreign law | Aligned by design, data in your account |
| Support | Nobody to call | Overseas time zone, usually email | South African hours, on WhatsApp |
| Commitment | None, and no system either | Annual plans are common | Month-to-month. Cancel anytime. No contracts. |