The questions you’d actually ask.

byteberry. is a two-person studio in Oakland, CA. Galen does the design and the writing; Ada builds the sites and runs the systems. We started the studio in 2026 because most small-business websites are broken in the same boring ways, and we wanted to fix that one neighborhood at a time.

We don’t subcontract, we don’t grow on purpose, and we ship every project ourselves.

Probably yes if you’re a small business with under fifty employees, you make or do something specific, and you’ve been frustrated by either DIY tools (Squarespace, Wix) or large agencies that quoted you fifty thousand dollars and three months.

Probably not if you’re early-stage with no customers yet, or you need a rebuild of a 200-page enterprise site.

Fill in the form on the contact page or email hello@byteberry.studio. We’ll write back within a day with a 20-minute discovery call link. No pre-call homework, no sales pitch.

If we’re a good fit, we’ll send a one-page proposal with scope, timeline, and a fixed price within a week.

Yes, and we strongly prefer to. Most small-business websites fail because the writing is bad, not because the design is. Our process puts copy before design for exactly this reason.

If you have a writer you love, we can work with them. We’ll just need their drafts in week two.

One 90-minute video call on Monday morning of week one. Both of us are on it. We ask roughly forty questions about your business, your customers, your competitors, and what you wish were different.

You don’t need to prepare anything beyond showing up. We send a recap by Friday with the brief.

One round of substantive revisions per stage: copy, design, build. Within a round you can request as many specific changes as you want.

Beyond that, we work hourly. The structure keeps everyone honest about what matters; most projects don’t need extra rounds.

We quote per project rather than publishing tiers, because the right number depends on scope, photography, and copy depth more than it does on page count. Once we’ve heard what you need, you get a fixed-fee, paid-in-halves number within a week.

No hidden hours, no surprise invoices, no retainer pressure.

Because anything longer is mostly waiting. Six-month engagements have one or two weeks of work and twenty-four weeks of email threads. Focused weekly milestones with a hard Friday deadline produce a better site, faster, with less back-and-forth.

The four-week clock starts when we receive your feedback, not the calendar. If you need a week to think on the copy, the project just shifts a week. We won’t drop you, and we won’t charge you for waiting.

That said, the projects that go best are the ones where the client treats it as their priority for one focused month.

Yes. 50% on signed scope, 50% on launch day. We invoice through Stripe; ACH and card both work. We do not take cryptocurrency, gift cards, or “exposure.”

If we underestimate the work, that’s our problem; the price is fixed. If you change scope mid-project (more pages, new features, different CMS), we’ll quote the addition before doing the work, and you can decide whether to add it now or after launch.

Marketing and service sites: Astro for the front-end, Sanity for content, Vercel for hosting. Commerce: a custom Shopify theme written in Liquid + modern CSS. All static, all fast, all editable by your team.

If you have a strong preference (Webflow, WordPress, Framer), we can talk, but we’ll be honest about why we don’t use them.

Yes, fully. The domain is registered to you, the hosting is in your account (we just deploy to it), the source code lives in a GitHub repo you own, the analytics is on your account, and the CMS subscription is yours. We are never a single point of failure.

Roughly $20/month for a marketing site (Vercel hobby + Sanity free + a domain). For commerce, Shopify is $39/month base. We’ll set up everything in your accounts during week four; you’ll see and own every charge.

Yes. Sanity (for marketing) and Shopify (for commerce) both have visual editors that let you change text, swap photos, add blog posts, and add products without writing code. We do a 30-minute walkthrough at launch and record it for later reference.

You get 30–90 days of free tweaks depending on the tier (Storefront / Booking / Shopfront). After that, we work on an hourly basis with a one-hour minimum. No retainer required.

If you’d rather have monthly hours reserved, we offer 4-hour and 8-hour blocks at a slight discount.

Your site keeps running and you keep owning it. Because everything lives in your accounts, any developer can pick up where we left off. The codebase is documented, uses standard tools, and isn’t locked to us.

Technical SEO (schema, sitemap, performance, accessibility) is included in every project. We set up Plausible for analytics; it’s privacy-friendly and doesn’t need a cookie banner.

We don’t do ongoing content SEO or paid ads. We can recommend people who do.