What a web agency in Cologne costs
An honest answer, the parts of the bill nobody quotes, and who should still hire one.
A real Clay site, built from a Google listing
Ask a Brauhaus in the Südstadt what its website has to say and most of the answer is about the days around Rosenmontag: which of them it is open, whether the kitchen runs, when the Köbes start pouring. A quote is for a site built once and handed over. The week it will be read hardest is not settled when the quote is written.
A small-business website built by people costs about €1,500, designer €700 · developer €550 · copywriter €250, and then a line every month for hosting and for somebody to change things. Clay is €29 a month for all of it, and you change things yourself.
What you are actually buying
Cologne is a media town before it is a web town, the broadcasters, the production houses, the fair grounds over the river in Deutz, so the studios in Ehrenfeld usually have a campaign or a corporate client as their baseline. They are good at that work. A café in Nippes is a different job quoted through the same process. The process is the cost. Nobody is being greedy.
This page is not for everybody
Two languages is the clearest case here. A hotel or a restaurant working the fair weeks in Deutz needs German and English at once, and Clay does one. An agency is also the answer when the site is a showreel, Cologne is full of businesses whose work is video, and Clay does not put video on a page.
Your photographs, already sorted
Clay reads the pictures on your Google listing, grades them, crops them for the shape each band needs and puts the best one at the top. Nothing to upload, nothing to resize.
What it looks like when it is live
Drawn rather than described, the page, the address, and what it can switch on.
How it works
Search your business
Type your name, Clay pulls your photos, hours, reviews and contact details straight from your Google listing.
Pick a style
Choose a look and Clay builds a full site around your content. Change anything with a tap, no code, no templates to wrestle.
You're online
Publish to your own name.clay.site in minutes. Add a custom domain and connect your own tools whenever you're ready.
What you get
Real sites, made with Clay
Open one. It is the live site in a frame, not a screenshot, so what you see is what it looks like right now.
Questions
Is an agency ever the right answer?
Two languages is the clearest case here. A hotel or a restaurant working the fair weeks in Deutz needs German and English at once, and Clay does one. An agency is also the answer when the site is a showreel, Cologne is full of businesses whose work is video, and Clay does not put video on a page.
What does an agency site actually cost in Cologne?
We publish one figure and it is a European average for a small-business build: €1,500, made of designer €700 · developer €550 · copywriter €250. We are not going to invent a Cologne number, ask two studios and you will have a real one in a day.
What is the part nobody quotes?
Changes. A new menu, a fourth photograph, a Sunday you decide to open. On an agency site each of those is somebody else's calendar and usually an invoice; over a year it is often more than the build. That is the line Clay is actually replacing.
What language will my site be in?
In German, written in it rather than translated into it, because the business is in Germany. A site is in one language: there is no switcher and no second version of a page.
Can I move to my own domain?
Yes, on the paid plan, and the free clay.site address keeps working afterwards, so anything already printed still lands: what free covers, and what it does not.
Try it with your business
Search your business and see your site in seconds, free, no signup.