Everything You Need to Know

Price scales with scope. A new website or redesign costs $4,000 to $15,000, depending on page count and features. A web application behind the site costs more. Either way, you get a fixed, written price before a single line of code is written, and there's no hourly meter running.

A website takes 2 to 8 weeks to launch. Web applications and other custom functionality take longer, and you get a real timeline up front. You see weekly progress the whole way. We've shipped 150+ projects, on schedule.

Every site is built from scratch on a modern stack. We don't use Wix, and we don't stretch an off-the-shelf theme to fit. We test mobile performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO before launch, then address the issues the tests uncover.

Yes, and it's a lot of what we do. We rebuild slow, dated websites into fast, modern ones that actually bring in business, and we migrate your content and protect your search rankings while we do it.

Yes. Beyond marketing sites, we build web applications: client portals, dashboards, booking systems, and AI-powered tools. If you can describe the workflow, we can build the software behind your website to run it.

Good. Start with the free audit, which is automated and scores your current site in minutes. Then tell us about your business and your goals, and we'll tell you what's worth building, what it would cost, and what it would return. There's no commitment and no pressure.

Yes. We're based in downtown Cincinnati, and we build for clients nationwide. Remote clients get structured communication, shared project boards, and regular check-ins.

We stay on after launch through a retainer. A retainer is a deposit you pay up front. We bill against it at $150 an hour whenever we touch your project, for any reason, and send you a monthly report on what we did. That includes security updates, performance monitoring, and help when something breaks. Retainer clients go first, with emergency support from 8am to 11pm Eastern, 7 days a week. Hosting is a separate monthly cost.

We build your site from scratch around your business, so it looks like your company, loads fast, and does exactly what you need. Template sites tend to be slow and look like everyone else's, and they break the moment you want something custom.

Yes. Moving a site to us is one of the most common things we do. We keep all your content, map redirects, check indexing and measure performance before and after the move. Clients tell us how much smoother everything feels afterward.

A website takes 2 to 8 weeks. Where yours lands depends on how many pages it has and whether it needs custom features like logins, booking, or a customer dashboard. If you're working toward a hard deadline, tell us and we'll plan around it.

Yes. We build every site so Google can read and rank it properly from day one, and we set up the technical groundwork that helps you climb the results. Paired with our SEO work, more people find you without you paying for ads. One measured example: after our rebuild, Cincinnati Condo Connection brought in 165 inquiries in eight months with no monthly plan. That's one site's result for that period, not a promise.

Yes. We build your site so you can change text, swap photos, and add blog posts or pages without a developer. We also train your team on how to manage it, and we're here if you ever want us to handle updates for you.

You get 30 days of support included for any fixes or tweaks. After that, you can keep us on a retainer. A retainer is a deposit you pay up front. We bill against it at $150 an hour whenever we touch your project, for any reason, and send you a monthly report on what we did. Retainer clients go first, with emergency support from 8am to 11pm Eastern, 7 days a week. We don't ship your site and disappear. Many clients stay with us for years.

Yes. We show you progress every week, so you can give feedback as it takes shape. Adjusting features along the way is normal and expected. Large changes may affect the timeline or budget, and we'll always tell you upfront before anything changes.

Yes. Speed is a requirement on every build. Our sites load in about 1.2 seconds, and every build ships passing Core Web Vitals, something only 48% of mobile sites manage (HTTP Archive Web Almanac, 2024). A slow site loses customers before they ever see your offer, so we make every site fast and keep it that way.

Design, development, testing, launch, 30 days of support after launch, and clear documentation. We also train your team so they're comfortable managing content on their own. You get one fixed price upfront with no hidden fees.

Yes, on a retainer. A retainer is a deposit you pay up front. We bill against it at $150 an hour whenever we touch your project, for any reason, and send you a monthly report on what we did. Security updates, content changes and fixes come out of it, and monitoring and backups keep your site fast and secure long after launch.

The website is yours. On final payment, the design, the content, and the code we write for you belong to you, and your data always does. Your proposal lists what's delivered and what stays a service. Sonor is the platform your site connects to, and it's ours. It runs the analytics, the CRM, the forms, the SEO tooling, and the AI features, so you get all of that working from day one without hiring anyone to maintain it. You use Sonor rather than buy it, and we'd rather tell you that now than have you find out later. If you want a site with its own backend instead, that's a custom build and we price it accordingly. Custom software is different again: an application or portal build comes with its own backend and you own 100% of it.

The cost depends on the size and complexity of your store. At Upforge, a custom Shopify or WooCommerce storefront runs $10,000 to $20,000, a high-volume build on Shopify Plus or scaled WooCommerce runs $15,000 to $30,000, and a fully custom storefront on our own commerce stack runs $25,000 to $50,000. Most stores land in that first band. Every tier includes a custom design, your product catalog set up, payment processing, and post-launch support. We give you a detailed, fixed price after a free consultation, with no hidden fees.

We build on both, so the honest answer is: it depends on what you want to own. Shopify is reliable and hands-off, and you pay platform rent for that convenience. WooCommerce is open source: no monthly platform fee, full ownership, but you (or we) carry hosting, updates, and security. And there's a third lane: a fully custom storefront on our own commerce stack, the one running live client stores today, with no platform rent at all. It handles ticketing, memberships, deposits, and standard catalog sales, and the module set keeps expanding to replace Shopify outright when a business wants that. We'll recommend the lane that fits, and we'll tell you plainly when the cheaper one is the right call.

Timeline depends on the size of the store: a standard Shopify or WooCommerce store takes 7-10 weeks. Shopify Plus with custom features takes 10-12 weeks. A fully custom storefront takes 12-16 weeks. For a standard store, our process runs one week for strategy and choosing the right setup, 2-3 weeks for design, 3-5 weeks for the build and connecting your tools, and a final week for testing, moving your products over, and launch. We can move faster for a time-sensitive launch without cutting corners on quality.

We integrate with all major payment processors. Shopify Payments (powered by Stripe) has the lowest fees, PayPal and PayPal Express add customer trust, Apple Pay and Google Pay make mobile checkout easy, and Shop Pay speeds checkout up. Klarna and Afterpay cover buy-now-pay-later, Square suits businesses with physical retail, and we build custom gateway integrations as needed. On Shopify builds we recommend Shopify Payments to eliminate the platform's extra transaction fee; on WooCommerce and custom builds, Square or Stripe keep it simple. Multi-currency support is available for international selling.

Yes, store migration is one of our specialties. We migrate stores between WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Squarespace, Shopify, and custom platforms, in whichever direction fits your business. Our migration process preserves: all product data (variants, images, descriptions), customer accounts and order history, SEO rankings via 301 redirect mapping, inventory levels and tracking, and discount codes and gift cards. We plan migrations carefully to minimize downtime, typically 2-4 hours of maintenance mode. Post-migration, we verify everything works before going fully live.

Conversion optimization is built into every store we create, and most of it comes down to removing friction. Product pages load in under two seconds. Checkout is one page wherever the platform allows it. The cart is designed for a thumb, not a mouse. Reviews and shipping and return policies sit where people actually look for them, and abandoned carts trigger a recovery flow instead of just disappearing. After launch we keep heatmap tracking and A/B testing running, because the real wins show up once you can see where people hesitate. Baymard Institute's research puts the conversion available from better checkout design alone at up to 35% for the average large store, and that's the lever we pull hardest.

Every e-commerce project includes: custom theme design (not templates), product catalog setup and optimization, payment gateway integration, shipping rate configuration, tax setup for your regions, inventory management training, technical integration with email platforms (e.g. Klaviyo) when you use them, Google Analytics 4 e-commerce tracking, mobile-optimized responsive design, 30 days of post-launch support, and team training documentation. Add-ons include a retainer for ongoing work, deeper technical SEO enhancements, and subscription/membership functionality.

Yes, on a retainer. A retainer is a deposit you pay up front. We bill against it at $150 an hour whenever we touch your project, for any reason, and send you a monthly report on what we did. That work covers app updates and compatibility testing, security monitoring and malware scanning, performance optimization, content and product updates, and conversion reviews. Automated uptime monitoring with immediate alerts runs around the clock, and backups run daily.

Yes. We regularly integrate stores with: ShipStation and Shippo for shipping, ERP systems (NetSuite, SAP Business One), warehouse management (Extensiv, Cin7), dropshipping (Spocket), 3PL providers (Amazon FBA, ShipBob), point-of-sale (Shopify POS, Square), accounting software (QuickBooks, Xero), and custom inventory databases. For complex multi-location inventory, we build real-time sync that prevents overselling. We document the integration setup for your team's reference.

Three things set us apart: 1) Sales focus: we build the checkout, catalog, and shopping experience around making the sale. 2) Speed: our stores load fast, and fast stores sell more. 3) Marketing-ready: we set up the analytics and connections your marketing tools need, so email, ads, and reporting all work from day one. We used to run a marketing and media agency, so we understand that side of the business. Today we sell development, and we make sure the store is built so your team or partners can run campaigns on top of it. Plus, we're a Greater Cincinnati team when you want to meet in person.

Yes, we're experienced Shopify Plus developers. Plus offers: checkout customization and branding, automated workflows (Shopify Flow), multi-currency native support, B2B/wholesale features, increased API limits, dedicated support from Shopify, and lower transaction fees at scale. We recommend Plus for stores exceeding $1M annual revenue or needing advanced features. Our Plus implementations include custom checkout experiences built to cut the steps between cart and confirmation, which is where most abandonment happens. Enterprise migrations from Magento are also a specialty.

E-commerce SEO is built into our development process: technical foundation (fast load times, clean code, proper indexing), product schema markup for rich snippets, optimized category page structure, internal linking strategy, canonical tags for variant handling, image optimization with descriptive alt text, and XML sitemap automation. Post-launch, we offer ongoing SEO services specifically for e-commerce: targeting product keywords, building authority, and optimizing for seasonal trends. We report on real ranking and traffic movement for your store rather than quoting an average that has nothing to do with your catalog.

A website page has to serve everyone: browsers, researchers, job applicants, existing customers. A landing page has one job. It gets one offer, one form, and no navigation menu to wander off into, because every exit is a way for a click you paid for to leave without acting. That constraint is why we build landing pages separately from the site they sit next to.

Yes, and it's an easy part to miss. Google Ads scores every keyword 1-10 on Quality Score, and landing page experience (mostly speed and relevance) is one of the three inputs. A higher score means a lower cost per click and better ad positions for the same bid, so a slow page costs you twice: fewer leads from the traffic you bought, and a higher price for every click. One client's Quality Score went from 4 to 9 after we rebuilt their page, and their cost per click dropped from $4.75 to $2.20. Same budget, 1,053 clicks became 2,273.

Three tiers. An Essential landing page is $1,000: template-based design customized for you, your copy optimized by us, form and tracking wired up. A Professional landing page is $3,000 and is the one most clients pick: fully custom design, professional copywriting, CRM and email integration, A/B testing set up with three versions, and click and scroll tracking. A three-page campaign is $5,000, less than two Professional pages bought separately. Every tier includes 30 days of support after launch and a fixed written price before we start.

No, and we'd rather say so up front. Professional video and photography do real work on a landing page: footage of your team, your work, and your customers builds credibility that stock images can't. We don't shoot it ourselves, so budget for it separately from the page. We'll help you find a videographer or photographer, give them a brief with the shots, lengths, and formats the page needs, and place what they deliver so it loads fast.

About two weeks for a single landing page (10 to 16 days), three for a three-page campaign. That breaks down as two to three days on strategy and messaging, three to five on design and copy, four to six on the build and testing, and one to two to launch and confirm tracking. If you need it faster, we offer a one-week rush for an extra $500 to $1,000.

If your ad groups promise different things, yes. The closer the page matches the ad that sent someone there, the better it converts and the better it scores. Our largest live system runs 30 landing pages for BD-AEC, one for each metro they sell into, each with city-specific copy and proof rather than a find-and-replace template. They all share one component system, so a fix ships to all 30 at once. Every submission routes to the same CRM with source attribution, so they know which page produced which lead.

Honestly, it depends on your offer and the quality of the traffic you're sending. A $20,000 service quote request and a newsletter signup are not the same ask, and cold display traffic doesn't behave like high-intent search traffic. So instead of quoting you an industry average, we measure your page against its own baseline. We instrument the page before and after, then report the lift on your traffic, your offer, and your numbers. If we can't show you an improvement you can verify in your own analytics, we haven't done the job.

You own your frontend. Custom applications built for you are 100% yours. Most marketing sites connect to Sonor, our shared backend, which includes regular feature updates and functionality at no extra cost. Sonor itself remains a service. For AI prototype-to-production projects, we agree ownership and backend scope case by case in the proposal; using Sonor offers a lower-cost route with more built-in functionality. Third-party services are listed separately.

We encourage it. About 85% of clients ask for new features within 6 to 12 months. Nothing's broken; they just see new opportunities once the software is running. You can add work as you need it, invoiced at $150 an hour, or put us on a retainer. A retainer is a deposit you pay up front. We bill against it at $150 an hour whenever we touch your project, for any reason, and send you a monthly report on what we did. Because we built it, we can add to it quickly.

Wherever you want it. We recommend managed hosting for simplicity and reliability, and we handle setup and ongoing monitoring for you. If your business or industry requires you to keep data on your own servers or a specific cloud provider, we can do that too. You stay in control of where your information lives.

It depends on how much the software needs to do. Simple tools take 6 to 8 weeks. A standard client portal or dashboard takes 8 to 12 weeks. Software with several moving parts and connections to other tools takes 12 to 16 weeks, and larger systems can run 16 to 24 weeks. Most projects land in the 10 to 14 week range. If you're on a deadline, we can launch a focused first version and add to it from there.

That's normal, and it's what the discovery phase is for. We sit down with you, map how your business runs today, talk to the people who will use the software, and sort out what matters most. If you're unsure about parts of it, we recommend building the core first, launching it, and then adding to it based on how your team actually uses it. That way you never pay for features nobody needs.

Yes. We've connected custom software to hundreds of different tools, including HubSpot, Salesforce, QuickBooks, Stripe, Shopify, and older in-house systems. During discovery we look at what you already use, confirm what needs to connect, and test it. If a tool can share data, we can almost always link it. If it can't, we'll find a workaround so your team isn't stuck doing double entry.

Small adjustments along the way are included. Larger changes, like adding a whole new capability such as payment processing, get written down, priced clearly, and worked into the timeline so there aren't any surprises. You see progress every week, so if priorities shift we adapt early. Many clients choose to launch the core first and add the rest later rather than delay going live.

Depends on the pain. If your team wastes 10+ hours weekly on manual processes, the ROI is clear: 10 hours × $50/hour × 52 weeks = $26,000/year saved. A $20,000 application pays for itself in 9 months. If manual work isn't a major pain, off-the-shelf software may be enough. If custom development isn't the right fit for your situation, we'll tell you upfront, during discovery.

Most marketing websites use 50/50: 50% to start and 50% when you approve the finished work. Most applications use 40/30/30: 40% to start, 30% at the agreed project milestone and 30% on completion. Your proposal sets the schedule for your project.

Hosting runs $29-$300/month depending on users and features. A domain is about $15/year, and SSL is included with hosting. A retainer is optional. A retainer is a deposit you pay up front. We bill against it at $150 an hour whenever we touch your project, for any reason, and send you a monthly report on what we did. Updates, support, and minor enhancements all come out of it. Retainer clients go first, with emergency support from 8am to 11pm Eastern, 7 days a week.

Custom property management portals range from $15,000 to $25,000 depending on scope. A basic tenant portal with rent payments and maintenance requests starts around $15K. Full-featured platforms with owner dashboards, mobile apps, and advanced reporting run toward $25K. The key difference from SaaS: you pay once for the build instead of a fee on every unit, and the portal then costs about $150-250 a month to run. How fast you recoup it depends on your unit count, because the savings scale with the portfolio. The worked 500-unit example on this page pays back in about 17 months; our 2,050-unit client was net positive in about three and a half.

Eighteen to twenty-five weeks from contract signing to launch for the full platform. Discovery and design take three to five weeks, and the core web portal is ready for testing around week 7 to 11. The dashboards, payment setup, and native iOS and Android apps follow, so the apps are done by week 15 to 21, with testing and launch after that. If you only need the core tenant portal, without the dashboards and mobile apps, it's closer to our other customer portal projects, which take 8 to 12 weeks. Either way we can run the new portal alongside AppFolio or Buildium for two to three months so rent collection never has a gap.

Yes. We recommend running both systems in parallel for 2-3 months. New tenants can start using the new portal immediately while existing tenants transition at their own pace. Property managers can mark manual payments (checks, cash) in both systems during overlap. Most clients fully transition within 60-90 days with zero disruption to rent collection.

Unlike AppFolio's $1.49/unit/month pricing that scales with your portfolio, your custom portal has fixed infrastructure costs (~$200/month) regardless of unit count. Adding 100 or 1,000 more units costs nothing extra. You also avoid AppFolio's typical $1,500+ integration fees for new properties. The platform architecture supports unlimited properties, units, and users with no performance degradation.

Very little changes for tenants. They'll create an account on your branded portal (takes 2 minutes) and link their bank account via Plaid (30 seconds). ACH fees can stay at what they pay now ($2.49 is standard). The difference is that the fee revenue goes to you instead of AppFolio. Tenants who prefer paper checks can keep mailing them, and property managers mark those payments manually in the system.

We integrate Plaid for instant identity verification and bank account ownership confirmation. For credit checks and background screening, we can integrate with your preferred provider (TransUnion SmartMove, RentPrep, etc.) or implement Plaid's income verification for $2-5 per check. Application fees ($20-50) are collected through the portal, with net profit of $15-45 per application after verification costs.

Yes, and you own 100% of the source code and the backend it runs on. After launch you can request feature enhancements from us at our standard hourly rate, or hand the codebase to any developer you like. Owning it outright is the whole point: it's what ends per-unit pricing permanently, and it's the thing AppFolio and Buildium will never give you at any price. For ongoing work there's an optional maintenance retainer: you put down a deposit, and we bill feature updates, security patches, and iOS/Android app updates against it at $150 an hour, with a monthly summary of the work.

Fixed monthly infrastructure costs run approximately $150-250/month total: hosting ($40-80), database ($50-100), email service ($20-50), push notifications ($0-20), and app store fees ($20/month). ACH processing costs $0.40 per transaction through Plaid + Dwolla. If you charge tenants $2.49 per ACH (same as AppFolio), you profit $2.09 per transaction. A 500-unit property with 60% ACH adoption generates ~$7,500/year in ACH profit alone.

Our portals are built for multi-LLC operations from day one. Each property or LLC gets its own Dwolla sub-account routing to its designated bank account. Rent payments automatically flow to the correct LLC's account based on which property the tenant occupies. Owner dashboards show per-LLC reporting. The central admin dashboard shows management everything in one place while keeping each LLC's finances properly separated.

Yes. The property manager dashboard is built for non-technical users, with plain, simple screens instead of developer tools. Common tasks like approving applications, viewing payment status, responding to maintenance requests, and running reports are point-and-click. We provide live training sessions (recorded for future reference), written documentation, and 30 days of post-launch support. After that, an optional maintenance retainer covers ongoing questions and issues.

Four kinds of work, broadly. There's chat and phone: assistants that answer from your real pricing and hours, book the appointment, and hand off to a person when they should. There's automation, which covers the paperwork, the inbox, and the follow-up that currently depends on somebody remembering. There's insight: dashboards that tell you what changed this week, and forecasting built on your own history rather than an industry average. And there's content, from writing in your voice to an internal assistant trained on your own documents. All of it gets built around the systems you already run. We don't ask you to move to ours.

A single chatbot or automation starts at $3,000. Most clients land on our Professional tier at $7,000, which covers multiple agents and CRM and calendar integrations. Hosting is a monthly cost, and ongoing support and optimization run on a retainer billed at $150 an hour. Full-scale AI infrastructure for a larger organization starts at $25,000 and scales with scope. Those are real starting numbers, and you'll get a fixed price once we understand what you're actually trying to automate.

Yes. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is the open standard AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude use to connect to outside systems, and an MCP server is the connector on your side. We build public ones that let assistants answer questions about your business and book a call, and private ones that let your team's assistant work with your real systems. Every agent gets its own identity, reading is kept separate from acting, and messages to customers or anything involving money default to a dry run or a person's approval. upforge.io runs one you can try, and our plain-English guide at upforge.io/resources/mcp-servers explains how they work.

Our production systems run on OpenAI models today. Everything we build is model-agnostic, so the same architecture can route to Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, or open-source models when a use case calls for it on cost, privacy, or speed. We pick the model per task rather than per project, so high-volume routine work runs on cheaper models while judgment-heavy work gets a frontier model. You'll always know which providers touch your data.

Yes, and it'll do a lot more than answer FAQs. It reads your knowledge base and documentation in real time, so it answers from your actual pricing and services instead of guessing. It connects to your CRM, so the conversation is personalized and the lead lands somewhere you'll actually see it. It books appointments, qualifies leads, takes orders and payments where that makes sense, and escalates to a human the moment a question needs one. It runs around the clock, in multiple languages. How much of your inbound it can take off your team depends on how repetitive that inbound is, and we'll give you an honest read on that before you commit.

It depends on what you're building. A single chatbot or content tool takes two to four weeks. A custom assistant wired into your backend takes four to eight. A full automation system spanning several workflows runs eight to sixteen weeks, and a large enterprise build can take three to six months. We work in short cycles with regular demos, so you'll see something running inside the first two weeks, and you can start using the early pieces while we build the rest.

We design every build around data security from the start. Your data is encrypted in transit and at rest, access is role-based, and every autonomous action is logged with an audit trail and approval gates. We don't train models on your proprietary data, and we scope AI access per project so one client's data never touches another's. For sensitive workflows we'll walk you through exactly where your data goes and which providers touch it before anything ships.

Traditional automation follows fixed rules ("if this, then that"). AI integration adds judgment on top: it reads context, makes decisions, handles exceptions, and improves over time. For example, traditional automation routes emails by keyword, while AI reads intent, sentiment, and urgency and routes them accordingly. We often combine both, with plain automation for predictable tasks and AI for the complex decisions that used to need a person.

Usually, yes, though we'd rather show you where than hand you a percentage. The savings come from a familiar set of places: support questions answered without pulling someone off other work, content that takes an hour instead of a day, data entry that stops happening, scheduling that stops leaking time, and equipment problems caught before they become downtime. Gartner projects that agentic AI will resolve 80% of common customer service issues and cut operational costs 30% by 2029, which tells you the direction of travel. What it's worth in your business depends on your volumes, so we start with a cost-benefit analysis on your actual numbers before you commit to anything.

Yes, and AI needs it. Models get retired, APIs change, and a prompt that worked beautifully in March can quietly drift by September. Maintenance runs on a retainer. A retainer is a deposit you pay up front. We bill against it at $150 an hour whenever we touch your project, for any reason, and send you a monthly report on what we did. That work covers performance monitoring, prompt tuning as models evolve, integration fixes when a vendor changes something underneath you, and retraining as your business data grows. You also get regular performance reviews and a quarterly session to look at what's worth automating next, now that the first thing is running.

That's most of what we do. You don't want a standalone AI tool sitting awkwardly beside everything else you run. We've connected AI to CRMs like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho, to ERPs like SAP, NetSuite, and Dynamics, to Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento, and to plenty of custom web apps, databases, and internal tools. Anything with an API is straightforward. When there's no API (and with older systems there often isn't), we build a connector or automate the interface directly. Tell us what you're running and we'll tell you honestly whether it's a two-week job or a real project.

Two things: websites and web applications. Our websites are custom builds, never templates, made to rank on Google and turn visitors into customers. Our web applications are the software your off-the-shelf tools can't handle, like client portals, dashboards, booking systems, and internal tools. You own your frontend, and custom applications built for you are 100% yours. Most marketing sites use Sonor, our shared backend with regular updates and functionality at no extra cost. AI prototype-to-production ownership and backend scope are agreed case by case in your proposal; platform and third-party services are listed separately. If you're not sure which one you need, tell us what you're trying to fix and we'll point you the right way.

It comes down to what you need it to do. A website markets your business. It explains what you offer and turns visitors into leads. A web application runs part of your business, like a client portal, a booking system, or the internal tool that replaces your spreadsheets. If you need to get found and get chosen, you need a website. If you need software your team uses every day, you need an application. Plenty of clients need a bit of both, and we can tell you which after one conversation.

It depends on scope, so we quote each project rather than guess. As a rough guide, most custom marketing websites land between $4,000 and $15,000, and larger sites with custom features run higher. Web applications run $5,000 to $50,000, and most clients invest $18,000 to $35,000, because a portal with logins, dashboards, and integrations is usually a bigger build than a marketing site. Once we've scoped the work, you'll get a fixed or phased quote in writing before anything begins. We don't bill projects by the hour.

Most websites take 2 to 8 weeks. A focused site lands at the shorter end, and a larger site with custom features takes longer. Web applications usually take 10 to 14 weeks, depending on how much the software has to do and what it connects to. You'll get a written timeline at kickoff and an update at every milestone. If you're working toward a hard deadline, tell us early and we'll plan the build around it.

We start with discovery: your goals, your customers, and whatever the build has to connect to. Then comes design. We build in milestones and show you a demo at each one, so you see progress every week instead of waiting months for a big reveal. Testing, launch, and handoff come last. Websites and web applications follow the same process, and the same team stays with you from kickoff to launch.

Yes. Every project includes 30 days of support after launch for fixes and tweaks. After that, most clients move to a retainer. A retainer is a deposit you pay up front. We bill against it at $150 an hour whenever we touch your project, for any reason, and send you a monthly report on what we did. Retainer clients go first, with emergency support from 8am to 11pm Eastern, 7 days a week. Plenty of our clients have been with us for years.

Yes. If you already have a website, we'll audit it for free. It covers speed, Core Web Vitals, and technical and on-page SEO, and ends with a list of what to fix first. There's no obligation and no credit card. You can act on the notes yourself or hand them back to us. It's also an easy way to see how we work before you commit to anything.

Yes. We're based in downtown Cincinnati and happy to meet in person if you're local, but we build for clients all over the country. Remote clients get the same weekly updates, shared project board, and video calls, so where you're based doesn't change how closely we work together.

We reply to most inquiries within a couple of hours during business hours (Monday-Friday 9 AM - 6 PM ET, Saturday and Sunday 11 AM - 1 PM ET). If it's urgent, call us directly at (513) 951-1110. After-hours inquiries get a response by the next business morning.

Phone is fastest: call (513) 951-1110 for immediate help. For a detailed project inquiry, use the contact form or book a free consultation call through the online scheduler. You can also email us at hello@upforge.io.

Yes. We offer free 30-minute strategy consultations to every potential client. On the call we'll talk through your business goals and current challenges, then look at where we can help. There's no obligation and no pressure, just an honest conversation about what you need.

We're a web development and custom software company: websites and marketing sites (React / Next.js), web applications, e-commerce, integrations, performance and accessibility work, and AI-powered automation. We used to run as a full-service marketing and media agency, so we build with SEO, speed, and conversion in mind. We don't sell separate media production or ongoing ad-agency retainers today.

Yes. We're based in downtown Cincinnati, and we work with clients across the United States and internationally. Remote projects run on video calls, screen sharing, and project management tools. Many of our clients are outside the Greater Cincinnati area.

We've worked with clients in legal, real estate, e-commerce, manufacturing, professional services, restaurants, and technology startups. What we learn in one industry, we bring to the next project, wherever it comes from.

Timelines depend on scope. Most website redesigns launch in 2 to 8 weeks. Where you land depends on how much has to be verified before we write code, more than on page count. Most clients hand us the existing site and we start building within days, while a larger brand needs research and planning first. Custom applications and platforms tend to take 8-16 weeks or more. We'll give you a timeline specific to your project in consultation.

No. We don't lock clients into long-term contracts. A retainer is a deposit you pay up front. We bill against it at $150 an hour whenever we touch your project, for any reason, and send you a monthly report on what we did. Retainer clients go first, with emergency support from 8am to 11pm Eastern, 7 days a week. It's optional, and we'd rather earn the next project by delivering than hold you to fine print.

Pricing depends on scope. Most website redesigns run $4,000 to $15,000. Larger product builds and custom platforms range up to $50,000+. A retainer deposit is sized to your needs. Once the consultation gives us a clear picture of your project, we'll send a detailed proposal with transparent pricing.

Yes. Our office is on the 15th floor at 250 East 5th Street in downtown Cincinnati, a four-minute walk from Fountain Square. It's easy to reach from anywhere in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. Please book an appointment in advance so we can make sure the team is there to meet you.

It helps to have your business website (if you have one), a general idea of your goals, an approximate budget range, and your ideal timeline. None of it is required, though. We're happy to think it through with you on the first call.

Yes, for clients on retainer. Retainer clients have emergency support from 8am to 11pm Eastern, 7 days a week for critical issues like outages or security concerns, and get a dedicated channel for it, because keeping your product online is part of the job. Without a retainer, we can still work on your project. We send an invoice at $150 an hour and respond within one business day, but there's no priority and no emergency support.

It's a review of your public website: the pages anyone can reach without logging in. We measure speed and Core Web Vitals on mobile and desktop, check on-page and technical SEO, run automated accessibility checks, look at whether search and AI crawlers can reach your pages, and review how clearly each page leads to a call, form, or booking. The report ranks what to fix first and lists what a public review couldn't verify.

Usually within a few minutes. We email you a link to your report with the scores, findings, and prioritized fixes, so there's no PDF to download. A slow or very large site can take longer; the link arrives when the report is ready.

Yes, it's completely free with no strings attached. We'd rather show you what we can do before asking you to commit to anything. There's no obligation to buy any services, and the audit report is yours to keep whether or not you choose to work with us.

Your name, email, and website address, plus your phone number and goals if you'd like to share them. We only review the publicly accessible site. We don't need logins, and we don't test anything behind one.

Free online tools check basic metrics. Our audit is automated too, but it goes much deeper: it crawls your public pages rather than one URL, backs every finding with evidence, and ends with an honest verdict. You also get the fixes ranked in the order to tackle them, which a generic tool won't give you.

We use your details to prepare the audit and respond to your request, and we don't sell them. Like every form on this site, your submission is stored in Sonor, the platform we use for forms and our CRM, and service providers help process it: the text you send is checked for spam by OpenAI, and your website address goes to Google PageSpeed Insights for the speed test. Our privacy policy lists each provider and what it receives.

The audit is yours to keep and use however you like. If you want help with the recommendations, we're happy to talk about how we can help. There's no pressure, and many clients use the audit to make the improvements on their own.

Any publicly accessible website, on any platform (WordPress, Shopify, custom-built, and so on) and in any industry. The review covers what anyone can reach from the outside. Client portals, logged-in areas, and checkout or payment flows need test access and a separate scope.

Then the audit helps you decide what to fix first. It puts numbers on the issues and ranks them, and it often turns up problems you didn't know about. You come away with a clear order of fixes, starting with the ones that will do the most for your business goals.

Yes. We're based in downtown Cincinnati, and while we specialize in local businesses across Ohio and Kentucky, we run audits for businesses nationwide. The analysis works the same for any website, wherever the business is.

The usual signs are quiet ones: a hero that takes seconds to appear on a phone, a contact route that's hard to find, reviews that sit unanswered, and pages that never show up for the searches your customers actually type. The audit measures the ones visible from the outside and ranks them. It can't see whether form submissions reach your inbox, whether anyone follows up, or how many leads you win. Those need your records or an agreed test, and the report says so rather than guessing.

Then the report says so, in writing. Every audit computes an honest verdict from measured signals, and the verdict has a clean-bill state. The sample review of our own site concludes: you don't need us for this. We'd rather tell you that than invent work. A clean verdict covers what we measured on the public site. It isn't a guarantee of rankings, leads, or sales.

Yes. Three live samples are linked on this page. The review of catholicforester.org (audits.upforge.io/r/sample-catholic-order-of-foresters) shows what a room-to-grow verdict looks like, the review of our own upforge.io (audits.upforge.io/r/sample-upforge) shows the clean bill of health, and the automation review of a Northern Kentucky HVAC business (audits.upforge.io/r/sample-automation-hvac) shows all four lead channels leaking. What you receive is the same format at a private link.

Yes, with the same limits. An app audit reviews the public parts of a portal or tool: its sign-in pages, speed, and the tech underneath. An automation review looks at how your business captures demand from the outside: chat and booking coverage, how the contact routes behave, and review responses. Testing behind a login, or following a submission through to your inbox, needs access you grant and a separate scope. Mention what you want looked at when you request yours.

We focus on web development and custom software: marketing and brochure sites, e-commerce, SaaS-style apps, portals, and automation. The portfolio covers tourism, legal, manufacturing, and more. Some case studies include results from when we also ran broader marketing programs. We've since narrowed our focus to engineering, but that marketing experience still shapes how we build.

We track the numbers the business runs on: traffic, conversions, lead flow, performance scores, and revenue where we can tie it to the build. When a client allows it, the case study publishes the actual figures. At Queen City Riverboats the work was mostly about UX, and traffic to queencityriverboats.com is up modestly. Destiny Yacht Charters reached 100 organic clicks from Google in its first 30 days live, with no previous website.

Results depend on your business, but you'd get the same process: learn the product and its users, ship quickly, measure what matters, and keep iterating. We'll look at your current setup and propose a scoped plan instead of promising a copy of someone else's outcome.

A focused landing page might take a few weeks; a full marketing site takes 2 to 8 weeks; larger custom products run longer. Timelines are agreed up front and tied to milestones. We don't treat "marketing campaign phases" as a substitute for a delivery plan.

Yes. We're based in downtown Cincinnati and work with plenty of Ohio and Kentucky businesses, but we take on clients nationwide. Remote projects run on the same process and get the same care as local ones.

We have deep experience in tourism and entertainment, legal, real estate, e-commerce, manufacturing, hospitality, automotive, and SaaS, and the portfolio shows it. Each build is designed around the way that industry actually works.

Start with a free website audit, which runs automatically, or book a short call. On the call we'll go over what you have today, where you want to go, and whether we're the right build partner. There's no hard sell, and you'll leave with a clear next step.

We're a development-led team. We used to run as a full-service marketing and media agency, and that taught us how sites have to perform once they're live. Today we put that experience into code, architecture, and product delivery. You work with one accountable team, and we judge the work by its results.

We scope every project on its complexity, timeline, and required features. After a free consultation, you get a detailed proposal with a fixed price and no hourly billing, so nothing surprises you later. The quote is written for your project.

Most marketing websites use 50/50: 50% to start and 50% when you approve the finished work. Most applications use 40/30/30: 40% to start, 30% at the agreed project milestone and 30% on completion. Your proposal sets the schedule for your project.

We use an agile approach, so scope adjustments are normal. Minor changes are absorbed into the project. Significant scope additions get a change order with clear pricing before any work begins. Weekly demos let you see progress and adjust priorities early, before it costs money.

Yes. Every project includes 30 days of post-launch support for bug fixes and adjustments. After that, you can put us on a retainer. A retainer is a deposit you pay up front. We bill against it at $150 an hour whenever we touch your project, for any reason, and send you a monthly report on what we did. Retainer clients go first, with emergency support from 8am to 11pm Eastern, 7 days a week. Without a retainer, we can still work on your project. We send an invoice at $150 an hour and respond within one business day, but there's no priority and no emergency support.

Our smallest engagements start around $1,000 (a performance tune-up, an accessibility fix, or an Essential landing page). Most projects fall in the $4,000-$25,000 range. We'll tell you honestly in the first consultation whether your project is a good fit.

Yes. Tell us your budget and goals, and we'll scope the most valuable project that fits inside that range. We'd rather build something excellent within your limits than overpromise and underdeliver.

All projects are fixed-price with a detailed scope. You know exactly what you're paying before we start. Ongoing work is billed at $150 an hour, either against a retainer you fund up front, with a monthly report on the work and priority, or by invoice without one.

You own your frontend. Custom applications built for you are 100% yours. Most marketing sites connect to Sonor, our shared backend, which includes regular feature updates and functionality at no extra cost. Sonor itself remains a service. For AI prototype-to-production projects, we agree ownership and backend scope case by case in the proposal; using Sonor offers a lower-cost route with more built-in functionality. Third-party services are listed separately.