How to Offer Websites to Your Clients Without Building Them Yourself
Every consultant who serves local businesses gets asked the same thing eventually: “can you do our website too?” Saying yes used to mean becoming a web shop. Here is how to say yes without it.
The question every consultant gets
If you do marketing, SEO, photography, bookkeeping or design for local businesses, you have been asked to “do the website too”. The honest answer used to be a choice between two bad options: refer it out and lose the relationship for a month, or take it on and become a web shop — templates, hosting bills, content chasing, and a client who calls you every time the opening hours change.
The third option is to sell the website and not build it. Not in the sense of outsourcing it — in the sense of using a tool where the build is the easy part and your value is everywhere else.
What you actually sell
With blasa’s Creator plan the site is built from the client’s Google Maps listing in minutes — their real reviews written into a headline and sections, their photos, their hours, their customers’ language alongside English. So what you sell is not “a website”; anyone can generate one. You sell the pitch (you built it before the meeting, and it says what their customers say), the judgement (which of their three listings, which domain, what to put in front), and the handover (they wake up with a working site in their own account and someone to ask).
Price accordingly. The plan is a flat fee to you and the seat is reusable, so the margin on each client is yours to set. Designers typically bill a one-time setup — the pitch, the seat, the domain, the handover — at a fraction of a bespoke build and a multiple of what it cost them. The client is comparing it to nothing, not to a quote, because a business with no website has no baseline.
How seats keep this simple
You hold a pool of pitch sites and a smaller number of pro seats. A pitch site is free and carries a badge — fine for showing. A seat is what you place on a site once the client signs: ad and badge off, their own domain, a new page every day. Seats are a lease, not a gift: move one off a site and it is free for the next client.
And when a client eventually buys their own plan — because they want to run it themselves, or because you moved on — their site keeps everything and the seat comes back to you. That one rule is what makes this a business rather than a favour: a client outgrowing you is a free seat, not a loss.
Say the limits out loud
This works for the vast middle of local business — the ones with customers and no website — and not for everyone. There is no editor, so a client who wants custom layouts needs a real web shop and a real budget; send them there. It needs a Google Maps listing with reviews to build from. It does not do online shops or paid booking. Saying this in the first conversation is what makes the rest of your recommendation trustworthy.
For the mechanics of the workflow itself — building before the meeting, seating, handing over — read how web designers build client websites from Google reviews in minutes.
Questions people actually ask
How can I sell websites to clients if I am not a developer?
Use a tool that does the build and leave yourself the parts that need a human: the pitch, the pricing and the handover. blasa’s Creator plan builds a complete website from a client’s Google Maps listing in minutes — their reviews become the copy, their photos the gallery. You hold it while you sell, put a seat on it when they sign, and transfer it to their email. There is nothing to code and nothing to design. Details at creator.blasa.shop.
How much should I charge a client for a website built this way?
Charge for the outcome and your judgement, not for the minutes it took. The plan is a flat fee to you, so the margin is yours to set: many designers bill a one-time setup that covers the pitch, the seat and the handover, then either stop there or let the client take over their own plan later. What you should not do is price against the build time — the value to a business with no website is a business with one.
Who owns the website after I hand it to the client?
The client does. Transferring it puts the site in their own account: they see its calls and messages, they correct their hours, and it stays theirs if they stop working with you. What stays with you is the seat that keeps it ad-free — a lease you can move to another client — and a line in your dashboard showing the site and whether it was claimed.
Do I have to maintain the websites afterwards?
No, and that is the point. Paid sites publish a new page every day written from the client’s own reviews, so fresh content happens without anyone writing it, and owner corrections — hours, phone, links — are the client’s to make in their dashboard. You are not the person they call about a typo.
What if a client wants to leave and run it themselves?
They buy their own blasa plan and nothing else changes for them: same site, same address, same daily pages. The seat you had on their site is returned to you automatically. A client outgrowing you costs you nothing and frees a seat — it is built to be a good outcome, not a churn event.