The honest version of this conversation starts with the agency invoice you're already paying. Most boutiques we talk to are paying between $800 and $2,500 a month to an SEO or Shopify-marketing agency that's optimizing for Instagram reels and the occasional Google Ads campaign, with no per-designer pages, no Brand or Product schema, no editorial layer, and no idea what Cite-met is. We always come in below that number, and the audit is free. Send us the URL and we'll show you the gaps inside a week. The audit form is here.
The four build tiers
Build tiers are one-time. They land the website itself, the schema layer, the editorial blog, and the AEO setup. After that, you decide whether to take a monthly retainer or sit on the build for a season.
Site at $2,500
Up to 8 pages: home, about, the shop, the editorial blog, a contact, and 3 designer landing pages. The right tier for a single-location boutique with 4 to 6 stocked designers and a clear brand voice already in place. Includes 100% original copy and foundational AEO setup. The starter for a shop that needs the website working before the next season drops.
Story at $5,000
Up to 15 pages plus audio/video pipelines, which is to say we wire Loom-to-blog and voice-memo-to-essay into your editorial layer so the founder's voice and the buyer's curatorial notes become content without a dedicated writer. The right tier for a boutique with 8 to 15 designers, an editorial point of view, and the desire to publish something monthly without it eating a buyer's week.
Engine at $9,000
Up to 200+ programmatic pages with structured data automation. One page per designer (Issey Miyake, Erdem, Aesop, Le Labo, A.P.C., Lemaire, on through the roster), one page per product with Product and Offer and AggregateRating schema, the city pages for the markets you serve, the editorial archive. This is where the AEO compounding actually starts. The model that ranked Zebra Home Cinema's 190+ pages is the same pattern we use here, scaled to the boutique's catalog. The portfolio covers it.
Studio at $15,000+
Custom headless build, multi-domain rollouts, embedded conversational layers for the styling concierge. The tier for boutiques that have outgrown the Shopify theme world or that run multiple concept stores under one ownership. Studio is where the headless Next.js plus Shopify back-end migration lives, and it's the tier we'd quote for a serious concept-store chain.
The four retainer tiers
Retainers are monthly. They keep the AEO posture current, the schema valid, the citations growing, and the editorial layer alive. You can sit at any retainer tier indefinitely, and you can step up or down.
Care at $60/mo
Cite-met hosting, llms.txt and schema maintenance, monthly AI-traffic tracking (the Human/SEO/AI visitor split). The baseline. Everyone who ships a build with us starts here at minimum.
Local at $300/mo
Care plus 1 SEO post a month, local schema, and Google Business Profile sync. The right baseline for a single-location boutique that wants the AEO compounding without a heavy content load.
Growth at $700/mo
Local plus 4 posts a month, brand-mention tracking, and light link building. The right tier for a boutique that wants the editorial blog publishing weekly and the brand-mention monitoring running across the press the shop tends to attract.
Authority at $2,000+/mo
Growth plus Reddit seeding, Wikipedia work, digital PR, and original research. The tier for a concept store building a national or international presence and treating the editorial layer as a marketing channel in its own right.
What about the agency at $1,200 a month?
If the boutique is currently paying $1,200 to $2,500 a month to an agency, the build-plus-retainer math usually beats it inside a single quarter. Engine at $9,000 plus Local at $300/mo is $12,600 in year one and $3,600 a year after that, versus $14,400 to $30,000 a year for the agency that's selling you reels and Google Ads. The version with our retainer also includes the per-designer schema, the editorial blog, the Satori OG image pipeline, and the Cite-met AI-traffic tracking, none of which the typical agency ships at all. We audit you free and quote in plain dollars.
The rule of the house
We always quote below what you're paying now, and the audit is free. If we can't honestly come in lower than your current agency invoice while shipping more substance, we tell you that on the audit call and you walk with the audit doc. No retainer trap, no deck. The audit form is here and we come back inside a week.