Agency Subscription Plans

When you choose one of Unbranded Space’s Agency plans, you’re paying for a certain amount of time each month. This way, you can choose only as much time as you need. This is something you can’t do if you hire a designer, developer, or writer to work for you all the time, part-time, or even just now and then.

Plus, if you need expert skills in design, development, or writing, you might have to hire more than one person. But with our Agency plans, you get all these skills in one package.

What’s more, you won’t have to pay extra things like vacation or sick days. And you won’t have to find work for your team when things are slow. With our Agency plans, we handle all that for you.

Unbranded Space has been building websites for over 20 years. For many of those years, we have used a formal contract and still do if the client would prefer to not subscribe to an Agency Plan. It is our years of experience that allow us to provide contract-free Digital Design, Development & Marketing services with confidence. We believe this arrangement represents a lower overall risk than standard formal contracts.

When a Web Agency asks a client to sign a contract it is to ensure that the requirements of a job are clearly defined. They may define milestones that must be achieved by specific dates and a set cost for services. There are many phases and tasks involved in taking a website from planning to publication. These phases can vary dramatically in length and therefore the only way a contract can be costed up front is to either:

1. Limit the scope of the project eg. place a limit on the number of pages OR
2. Price High to allow for tasks or phases taking the maximum amount of time.

There are two problems with this approach. The first requires that limits are defined before the job even starts. This is usually done before the agency has had a chance to research deeply the specific needs of the client and their website, meaning the client could end up with substandard results. The second approach means that the client could be paying more than what they need, and even the scope of the project may not have the required flexibility built in to get the best results.

It is important to note that our Agency Subscription Plans are designed to allow both us and our clients to work together without having to constantly negotiate and renegotiate the contract. However, this does not mean that it is completely devoid of Terms & Conditions. These are a standard set of Terms & Conditions that apply to all of our Agency Plans and we encourage you to read them as they should provide some assurance and may answer any questions you have. When you sign up for an Unbranded Space Agency Plan for the first time you will be asked to confirm your agreement to these conditions.

An Unbranded Space Agency Subscription Plan avoids complicated Design Contracts meaning that there is no need to lock in the exact number of pages up front and you won’t end up being overcharged for work.

You can request as much work as you like but you are limited by the allocated hours of your plan.

When you sign up for a Booster of Developer Agency plan, we set aside those hours for you. In most cases the work being performed will have been decided upfront, however, we aim to be flexible where we can perform extra work when needed.

If you request extra work and we don’t think it can be achieved in your monthly allocated hours then we can simply perform the extra work at our standard hourly rate.

If the extra work is going to require substantially more hours than those allocated then it may be more viable for us to upgrade your plan or extend it for an extra month. This way you still benefit from a cheaper hourly rate.

We do not believe that this will happen because:

1. We will discuss with you in advance the plan that is most suitable for your needs.
2. Digital design & marketing is never really done. There are so many add-on services we can provide. If we have designed a logo with hours to spare we can put together some business cards and stationery or a brand guide. If we have created a website and have time left over, we can set up reporting for you, create additional pages such as a blog post or landing page, generate some backlinks and much more. 

If in doubt we would encourage you to try a single month before committing to a longer term.

We can discuss how your hours are allocated prior to your subscription commencing. However, once it begins we usually need to keep to this allocation.

As a busy digital agency, Unbranded Space only has a certain number of hours we can allocate per month and when we allocate hours to a client we are potentially saying no to another client. For this reason, we have to be very careful in planning our workload from month to month. However, every subscription term is allocated a fixed number of hours and we are willing to negotiate at the beginning of a project how the hours are allocated. However, once a plan begins it is unlikely we will be able to change the hours allocated to each month, because of other commitments. 

A practical example could be a website project. This project might be allocated a 3-month Developer plan, allowing a total of 120 hours. This might be for a medium/large website project where in the first month we allocate 30 hours where research, discovery and planning occur, then 60 hours are allocated in the second month where most of the work is done, and then 30 hours in the last month to finalise the project. We will discuss your needs in advance and work out the best approach with you.

Service Plans provide Performance, Security and Search Engine Optimisations. These require the use of tools and third-party services. To continue to benefit from these services the plan must remain active at all times.

We provide a 1-month option because it provides businesses with an opportunity to test our services before committing to a longer term. Some businesses may have temporary cashflow limitations and paying for a full year may not be possible. The 12-month plan provides the best value overall, considerably discounted from the monthly option. Whether or not a business pays for a full year or a month at a time we strongly urge uninterrupted continuation of the service.

The Explorer plan is created for a specific purpose. It is designed so that we can undertake extensive research into your business, your competitors and your website’s keyword potential. It culminates in a content strategy for either a new or redesigned website or a content marketing strategy that might run over a series of months.

Therefore this plan is only required just the one time. The subsequent work such as a website or marketing campaign would then be best allocated to one of the other Agency GRowth plans such as the Booster or Developer plan – depending on what work is required.

Our Service Plans provide the option of paying monthly so the Plan Pause feature is not necessary. However, to get the best from a Service Plan it should remain active at all times, so even though the monthly option is available we discourage clients from using it as a way to temporarily suspend the service unless absolutely necessary.

With our larger plans that require us to allocate more hours we believe it unlikely that projects would ever require such a lengthy commitment. On the rare occasion that longer periods are required for our higher plans then plans can renewed ie. Two 6-month plans can be chained together to achieve 12 months. 

We would also encourage you to contact us if you need more hours or longer terms than our plans offer. We can discuss a special pricing arrangement.

Plan Pause requests allow you to pause your subscription on a 3-month or 6-month plan. It builds flexibility into projects, and also provides the opportunity to have some time “in the bank” should a project be completed in a much shorter time than anticipated. There are limits on the number of Pause Requests and the Total number of months that a plan can be paused (Total Pause Duration).

For example, a 6-month subscription can be paused 2 times but the total time paused can not exceed 6 months. This in effect allows you to extend a 6-month subscription out to a maximum of 12 months overall, but keep in mind that we are only working for you during 6 of those 12 months.

It should be noted that Plan Pause allows months and not hours to be “banked”. For example, if a 6-month subscription is active but the project is completed in 5 consecutive months, then that final month can be kept “in the bank” and can be reactivated at any time within 12 months from the initial plan commencement. If there are hours left over in that fifth month then we will continue to work on the project or provide add-on services until the hours have been achieved. 

We will talk with you to discuss the most suitable plan based on a given project or campaign we may run for you, so the need to change your plans should rarely occur. However in the event that a plan change is required then the following applies:

UPGRADE:

We will credit you the unused time on any current plan in place, and then charge you for the new plan and subscription period applying the credit on the invoice issued.

DOWNGRADE:

It is not possible to downgrade a plan until your current subscription service period ends. 

While we believe that the value will be evident in the work that we create for you, we do understand the “leap of faith” that might be involved in making the financial commitment to our Agency Subscription Plans. The reason we provide these plans is because we believe they are a win/win scenario for us and our clients. 

For us it means we have greater flexibility in how we can provide services to our clients. It removes a major hurdle of the rigidity of fixed contracts* and the time it takes to get them in place. Sometimes a project can be delayed by months in negotiations over a contract, whereas with an Agency Subscription plan, we can often get started immediately. It saves us time and makes our scheduling easier and this is why we provide discounts on our hourly rate for subscribers. Our Agency Plan subscribers win because they get our services cheaper and with quicker results. 

In summary, we want our clients to use our Agency Subscription Plans, but we know that they will only do that if they feel as if they are getting value from them. This reason alone is enough to ensure that we constantly strive to achieve the best results and value for our clients.

*We can and do still provide fixed contracts on request.

The cost of stock photos, graphics, videos, sound files or any other third-party assets is not included with Agency Subscription Plans as they are not always needed. We do not feel it fair to all clients if we build the cost of purchasing stock media assets into our plans as they may not need it. 

When we use stock media assets, we will only ever do so on your approval, and if we purchase them for you then we will invoice you for them at the end of a task or project.

Not all jobs we do require web hosting or maintenance, so this is not a cost we can bundle with our Booster or Developer Agency Subscription Plans.

By contrast, ongoing maintenance is a core part of our Service Plans. Hosting is included with the Voyager plan but is an add-on service for all other plans. We will certainly discuss your hosting needs allowing you to know your yearly ongoing costs in advance.

On the monthly plan you can request a refund if we have not yet commenced any work for you. If we have incurred merchant fees or any other costs that can not be recovered, then these will be deducted from the amount we refund.

On the 3-month or longer plans you can request a refund within the first 30 days of the service. If we have commenced work then your refund will be less 1 full month of the chosen plan. On the Service Premium Plan, we may need to deduct the cost of any third-party costs we have incurred.

You can not request a refund based on whether or not you like the service, but the 30-day refund policy (as detailed in the terms and conditions of your plan) still applies. We would encourage you to talk to us if you are not happy with a design or some other aspect of the work. One of the benefits of our Agency Subscription Plans is that you are not locked into a contract that restricts how many designs or alterations that you can have. We can make as many changes as you like within your plans’ hourly allocation.

While our subscription services provide the best value through discounts on our hourly rate as well as the convenience of being able to easily request work with a faster turnaround, we can still provide a fixed contract as an alternative to an Agency Growth Subscription Plan.

The way a contract arrangement works is that we will put together a proposal with the exact specifications of the job that also includes a quote for the cost of services proposed. Upon your agreement to the proposal, we will send you a contract for digital signing.

Before putting together a proposal we will need to talk to you about your needs. A 15-minute phone call is enough for us to usually provide a ballpark figure. However, unless you are absolutely sure about your needs then you may need to first schedule us for a consultation. This is an additional fee for service that must be paid for when needed if no existing contract is in place. Subscribers to an Agency Growth Subscription Plan, by comparison, can have the consultation included where they also benefit from a cheaper hourly rate.

We accept that, for some, a fixed contract may feel like a more secure arrangement because it is how traditionally this kind of work has been conducted. However, if this is your only reason for wanting a fixed contract then we encourage you to try one of our Agency Growth Subscription Plans. We are motivated to make this process work because our Agency Growth Plans can only succeed if our clients are happy.

If you’re still unsure, then you could try a Growth Plan for a single month and see how it works for you. If after a month of using a Growth Plan, you would still prefer a fixed contract then we can make that happen. You’ve benefited from 1 month’s work at a cheaper rate, but the remainder of the job can be provided with a fixed contract and quote.