What a web agency in Hamburg 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
The Fischmarkt opens at five on a Sunday morning, and a St. Pauli bar is still serving when it does. Neither keeps a week any template expects. What a studio hands over is a site that is exactly right on launch day, and after that, every correction goes through somebody's inbox and comes back with an invoice.
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
Der Spiegel and Die Zeit are made here, and a publishing and media trade grew up around them, so the studios in this city learned the craft on clients who have a marketing department. What you are buying from that bench is the process: a brief, rounds, a sign-off, a handover. A fish restaurant in the Portugiesenviertel is buying rounds of approval it has nobody to give.
This page is not for everybody
On the Reeperbahn the bar and the venue are often one room, and a venue is a different website: a line-up that changes nightly, tickets, a guest list, a page per act. Clay has no events section and no ticketing, and takes no payment anywhere on the site. That work is an agency's.
After launch
Trade here has a season, the terraces, the harbour, the Sunday Fischmarkt queue, and January does not pay like July. A monthly line on a website bill has no season: February costs what July costs. Price it against your quiet months rather than your good ones.
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?
On the Reeperbahn the bar and the venue are often one room, and a venue is a different website: a line-up that changes nightly, tickets, a guest list, a page per act. Clay has no events section and no ticketing, and takes no payment anywhere on the site. That work is an agency's.
What does an agency site actually cost in Hamburg?
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 Hamburg 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.