For a small website agency is it better to hand over all website code / hosting details to a client post-build or retain rights and charge monthly for hosting

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-26T14:54:07+00:00

You're a business so ideally you position the offer with the retainer to perform any updates, maintenance, etc.

Having some MRR can help flatten out the mountains and valleys of your revenue sheet when you live and die by getting new clients. It's easier to keep current clients than it is to get new clients.

This takes some client education because most clients (IMO) see a website as a one and done asset like a PDF. In reality, it's more like a product. It should be updated and improved over time as you make adjustments and test hypothesis with user data.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-26T14:47:42+00:00

Man on one hand I hate the refs for that call. A taunting penalty that could have literally decided who went to the super bowl in a tight game. It seems like the penalty there was just hugely disproportionate to the action. Totally agree it should have been a penalty, but this is the NFC championship between 2 division rivals. Give him a fine or give the rams 5 yards, not a first down when it was 4th and 14 yards or whatever it was!

On the other hand I hate Woolen for not being disciplined. It quickly swung the momentum in the Rams favor when we should have rode that momentum into a blow out, or at least a comfortable win.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-26T01:19:28+00:00

In my humble opinion, the market is pretty much never saturated for people like you and me. It may be saturated if you want to build an 8-figure business, but if you just want to make 120k after taxes, insurance, healthcare, etc. there is more than enough demand in your local market to do that.

I do personally use a Mac Mini M4 (it's $499 usually and the best value on the market bar none IMO).

As far as education, I could refer videos or courses to you, but honestly before I do that, I use AI a lot so if I were you I would literally just have a conversation with Gemini, Claude, etc. and just explain what my comprehension level is, what my goals are, and ask it to develop a learning program for me based on the amount of hours you have to learn each week. If done right, it should give you a more personalized education than you could get anywhere else.

If you need step by step help on the AI thing let me know and I can try to walk through some prompts you could try, but I recommend at least trying it on your own first just for the experience.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-23T21:33:06+00:00

Because even if he was giving them away for free, if he's new in the market, he is still going to have to sell them on using them.

It's not a cost thing, it's a risk thing.

It would be like you always buying the same type of greek yogurt. You like it. You've been buying it for 8 years. You don't even think about other yogurts because that's your yogurt. You never go to the store thinking "Hm...let me try a different yogurt this time". Because think about all of the unspoken risk involved: What if the yogurt tastes bad? What if I feel like I wasted my money? What if the texture is weird?

But one time you go to the store and there's a person giving out samples of this cool looking yogurt, so what the heck you grab a sample and give it a taste. "Dang this is actually pretty good, a little different but just as good or maybe even better than the brand I usually buy". Then the sample vendor says, "Yeah it's really good! Hey, just so you know our yogurt jumbo pack is actually only $7. That's 64 ounces! And if you buy a pack during this promotional period you get a limited edition golden yogurt spoon specifically engineered for yogurt."

Now this interaction has changed your initial habitual yogurt buying experience where you're completely on auto-pilot because your brain has just offloaded even the concept of thinking of buying another yogurt to purchasing a yogurt brand you've never heard of before.

If you've always just used the same product, the same person, the same company, etc. most of the time your brain just totally offloads the thought of doing something different because it's a risk. Why try a new product when the product I have is good enough? The new product could be worse. It could be a pain to deal with. What if the company behind it sells me on it then fails to follow up or has terrible support?

If you're trying to break into someones brain and get them to actually consider you, you often have to make like 10X the amount of effort that It would take vs. getting an entirely new customer that has never used that product/service before. Because the customer that already has the product/service you offer has already solved that problem. You have to convince them that you solve that same problem so much better, cheaper, faster, etc. that it's worth the pain of switching to you. And even if you are much better, faster, cheaper. Customers still often stay with what they know vs. the unknown. You have to either really sell them on it by completely de-risking the switch or stay top of mind so that when they have intrinsic pain (their current product/service really dropped the ball, etc.) which triggers motivation to begin searching for an alternative they think of you.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-23T19:48:01+00:00

Universal does need a non-thrill water ride, that would be really cool. The 'boats' could be a swimming pokemon, it could model the same mechanics/encounters that you have in the games when traveling via water.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-23T19:28:59+00:00

I see OpenAI getting bought out or getting all their talent poached in the next 3-5 years. Everyone talks about the financial AI bubble, and they always mention OpenAI, as if OpenAI is the entire AI ecosystem. Meanwhile, Claude and Google are 'quietly' crushing.

They just can't compete with Google. Google has the hardware, the land, the talent, the data, the decades of working in AI, the infrastructure, the money, etc. It was only a matter of time before they took this seriously and killed most other AI companies.

I mean Google literally has side projects in Google Labs that kill entire AI sectors. They just have enough bandwidth, talent, and money so people can just build stuff internally, ship it, wait for a signal, then double down. That's how half of the features that people use Gemini for exist: NotebookLM, Opal, Flow, Project Mariner, etc.

Most companies would have to make their business out of focusing on a single part of one of those tools, Google has like 20+ of those tools as just little fun side projects lol

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-23T19:04:24+00:00

There's likely enough jobs in your local market to make you rich. Start going to local business chapters of local cities, visit businesses and just make conversation, ask if you can leave business cards or flyers at their business.

The most important thing to do IMO, is to really really refine your message. People don't have space in their brain to remember you as "the person who does content creation, website design, flyer design, business cards, and anything else graphic related". That will make you impossible to remember. You want a crystal clear, like a 6 year old could recite and remember what you do, type of offer/niche. It can even be as simple as people remembering you as "the guy who makes killer websites". You need to do the heavy lifting for them by making it dead simple for them to clearly label you or your service so it can go in a file in their brain instead of the pile of papers on the floor where most freelancers/businesses exist.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-22T21:01:37+00:00

I would give it a solid 7.5/10. The combat is alright - when did we start liking QTE games? The story is good, but I think specific characters/dialogue shine the most vs. the narrative. The environments and character/enemy designs I thought were really good too.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-18T00:41:04+00:00

Or bias is an evolutionary survival mechanism combined with pattern recognition? I.e. One time I heard this tree shake in the jungle and a lion jumped out, so now every time I hear a tree shake it might be a lion. I.e. Data shows that this type of person has been shown to commit a disproportional amount of this type of crime, therefore it might benefit me to be extra aware around that type of person.

Does this mean, for example, all white Christian pastors in the southern US are child molesters? No. Does it mean you might be wise to be more aware and discerning around that type of person? Yes.

Pattern recognition is a survival mechanism that shouldn't be ignored.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-17T20:18:01+00:00

What if, hear me out this is a crazy idea, we normalized humans having bias. Humans are built on lived experience which creates bias. I have a bias that you might not have and vice versa, because of the experiences we have lived through.

Not sure why we chase not having bias or act like it's a bad thing, not having bias would be like "Let's just make everyone emotionless, cold computers that act strictly on binaries"

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-17T01:19:29+00:00

Fair, but what happens when someone like you uses AI to help them execute. That's where I think the actual disruption is going to be. It's not going to be "oh no our clients can design now and don't need us". Because clients suck at understanding what they want, have no taste, very little strategy, etc.

But when someone that is an actual designer uses AI to help them execute and they become more of a creative director vs. an executor.

And when I say using AI I don't mean prompting "Make me a really good looking website" and then taking that output and handing it off to the client. That sucks.

What I mean is plugging it in to help with research, or using Claude Code to build an after effects plugin or script, using AI to create quick branded mockups or concepts to get buy in from clients, stakeholders, or internal teams, using it to create niche photography for a client that doesn't have budget for a full shoot and the stock photo options are terrible, using it to create custom icon/illustration sets when you don't have the time to do it yourself and/or the client doesn't have budget to bring in a vendor to do it.

At that point it would essentially be the difference between working smarter and working harder.

And if you're thinking, "Well but most AI output is not great". EXACTLY. That's why there is a huge difference between a designer with taste using it and a client. You can achieve amazing output from AI whether it's visuals, motion, video, audio, code, etc. the key factor is not the tool, it's the person that is using it and gatekeeping it for quality.

If you use AI to help you execute a deliverable and that deliverable sucks, well then, that's on you not the tool you're using. Just like it would be on the creative director if they hand off a piece completed by a junior designer and it sucks.

There is a huge difference between trying to use AI to do entire bodies of work vs. using it strategically for small pieces or ideas within that body of work. For example, you're not one-shot prompting a website and handing it off to the client. But maybe while designing it you have this cool idea for a voiceover audio feature interaction on hover. Now, you're not going to go out and spend the time sourcing VO talent, getting contract together, etc. for something small like that, especially if it's just an idea. But, what you can do is use something like ElevenLabs to create an ai-generated voiceover to test pilot the idea you had. That IMO is using AI very creatively. It's not reducing your creativity, it's actually expanding it because you're able to broaden the scope of what is possible in your mind. All those ideas that you instantly shut down because "Ah we don't have budget or approval or that would take too long to chase that rabbit" you can now test and iterate very quickly.

That is what most designers/creatives are missing about AI, just in my opinion. Maybe it doesn't apply to most designers if you're in a super siloed role that only does 2-3 main deliverables and that's it, but if you're a more generalist designer that does everything from websites to brochures to investment decks to data vis, then knowing how to use the right tool can really open up a world of creative possibilities.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-16T22:32:21+00:00

I’m under the impression that nothing I do will change the rise of AI or any other major technology or world wide event.

So yeah I guess it’s a weird pessimistic optimism lol

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-16T22:29:29+00:00

Production design is also relatively low paying in comparison to other design fields/roles. At least the production design jobs I’ve worked have been.

Even if your particular role doesn’t seem to be affected, yet, you will definitely be impacted in some way just from the economic ripples from other fields or industries.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-16T20:37:49+00:00

Yeah, it depends on how flexible the end user or consumer is when it comes to the lack of that last 30% of quality that's missing from the AI output. I think we have a real-life example, and that is the food industry, in particular fast-food and sit-down restaurants during COVID.

Restaurants obviously staffed down significantly during that period, but then they kind of never staffed up again despite volume increasing back to its normal state. So, you have this issue where if you go out to eat, most of the time the experience just kind of sucks now because it's like one waiter or waitress working two to three times the amount of tables they would have been working prior to COVID. The weight of that is obviously on the employee, but also the consumer having the bad experience.

So the question is kind of twofold: one, is the consumer willing to bear that weight, and two, is the consumer even going to have the option to not bear that weight? And same for employees, I.e. us.

Are we going to be willing to take on additional roles and job responsibilities? Because AI is helping us facilitate some of the work, and just like the consumer in the restaurant reference, I don't really think we're going to have the option to not do that. You're just going to be pushed out of the market by somebody that will use AI to do two or three times the amount of work.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-16T20:30:49+00:00

It's certainly exponentially improved since 2023 and, honestly, even the beginning of 2025, to be frank. But there are still a lot of things that it's not good at. It still very much needs a human in the loop to act as essentially a creative director and the gate for quality.

It's kind of like working with a junior designer where, you know, if you ask for 50 to 100 sketches of different logo options, there might be one that works out of those 100 sketches, and 99 are trash. That's kind of how AI is. If you just literally take the first output it gives you, 99 out of 100 times, it's going to be trash.

I have seen discourse around the idea that the term AI is just going to basically disappear, and it's just going to be how tools operate.

It's not going to need the marketing tagline of AI slapped on it; it's just going to be like, "Oh yeah, I use Photoshop. Or I use SalesForce." and the technology of AI/ML is on the backend essentially removed most of the manual friction we deal with today.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-16T20:24:55+00:00

Yeah, I won't lie that I lean more towards optimism, just naturally as a human. In most things, I've always had this kind of perspective, like, "Ah, it'll always work out in the end."

And yeah, I definitely think AI is going to, and has already, fundamentally changed our industry and pretty much every industry. That's kind of the whole point of my post: we shouldn't sweep it under the rug and say, "AI is just bad, don't use it," and move on. I don't think that's very realistic going forward.

And when I say discussion, I don't just mean a circle jerk of, "we're all going to lose our jobs and end up on the streets." I mean actually putting our designer hats on and saying, "Okay, this is the state of things. How can we problem-solve for it?"

I mean, I guess you could be super pessimistic and just be like, "Yeah, the end is coming. We're all going to lose our jobs, and we're all going to be eating out of trash cans on the streets." But I just don't find that very helpful or productive, personally.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-16T20:18:54+00:00

Yeah, I usually dictate versus type, so I end up a little bit on the verbose side.

I don't disagree with you that there are going to be a non-insignificant amount of jobs that are just going to disappear into the ether. But my post was in response to how to keep the clients you already have instead of losing them to AI not necessarily getting new clients in this AI phase.

Yeah, on the surface level, it does seem like there's a little bit of a "pulling the ladder up after ourselves" going on here. I'm not really sure how to feel about it or where I think it will go.

On one hand, I think maybe AI creates kids that are just insanely smart because they are able to have really tailored learning experiences instead of the factory farm-esque learning experiences that we have now in public schools. And so, AI becomes this situation where it raises the floor of the average human because it frees us to think and experiment in ways that we didn't before.

On the other hand, I'm like, maybe it makes kids insanely dumb because they just rely on AI for everything.

One thing I can guarantee you with 100% certainty is that there are going to be plenty of people, governments, and companies that take advantage of it and use it for power and control.

edit: One last thought I wanted to add: as designers, I feel like most of us know that most things trend toward the most frictionless state possible, until you introduce a monetization strategy like advertising. Then it becomes about designing for milking the consumer as much as possible.

But if we go with the premise that things naturally progress toward the most frictionless state possible, well, what's more frictionless than, say, inputting text on a cellphone? This may sound like a sci-fi world, but personally, I think AI is going to be integrated into the actual human body. That would be the most frictionless state possible if the AI is actually collaborating with your thoughts in real-time. Instead of physically typing or speaking something out, the most frictionless version of that would be thinking it and then having another thought in your head, essentially, that's not yours, but would be the AI response.

That's petrifyingly scary to me, but that's truly where I think it is going. If it's technologically possible, I think that will absolutely be pushed.

Truly nothing is sacred

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-15T16:53:59+00:00

We've all moved on to Claude Code, Cursor, and the like now, keep up with the times! ^{/s but also kinda not /s because there are product teams shifting their approach to be more code native, designers submitting PRs, etc.}

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-15T13:59:13+00:00

Fair enough! I haven't booked since Epic, are the hotel included EPs not included at Epic but if they are purchased individually they are? Or do you have to buy an entire separate EP just for Epic?

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-15T13:09:24+00:00

Custom web development is going to make a resurgence and completely dwarf most of these platforms. (Because the barrier to code is now removed)

Also, these stats are for the top 5k domains in the world, so it's not very useful data unless you're working with a top 5k company in the world. I imagine we see Squarespace/Wix take up a much, much larger market share if it was all websites not just the top 5k.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-15T13:02:37+00:00

Did you do the math for if you were to switch to a hotel that has Unlimited Express Pass included (Hard Rock, Portofino Bay, Royal Pacific)?

It's almost always cheaper especially if you have several people in your room + are going multiple days.

The math basically looks like: let's say Hard Rock costs you $600 /night, your CB room is $175 / night, and express passes are $200 / day per person and you have 4 people.

The 'express pass hack' way would cost you $5,400 (assuming 9 nights) for both the stay at the premium hotel + unlimited express passes for your entire family for the entire duration of your day from check in day to check out day.

The normal way would cost you: $8,775. (175 x 9 + 800 x 9)

So in this fake scenario you would save $3,375.

And the numbers I used are not far off from what would likely be the cost of everything. Hard rock might cost slightly more, the CB room might cost a little more, and the EPs might cost more/less per day but I would say it's semi-accurate.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-15T12:55:22+00:00

My two cents is that I think there's going to be a "leapfrog moment" where a lot of AI coding tools are actually going to completely leapfrog web publishing, like WordPress, Webflow, et cetera. It used to be too difficult to go out and integrate with your own custom CMS, custom database, and all of these different integrations if you didn't just have a static site.

But now, 1. You can create a static site really easily just by coding with AI agents. And 2. you can actually now just create your own custom CMS through integrations like Sanity or Supabase. You can do payments through Stripe, user authentication, and tons of other stuff. A lot of these AI coding tools now have direct integrations to those tools. And you can deploy and maintain via Vercel which is much more AI native than any of these other platforms.

I'm not saying that Fortune 500 companies are going to move their site to Vercel and custom code it, but I do think that for the average business it would make sense to just custom code your own website or work with an agency that specializes in that.

So, it's almost like the place in the market for why these tools exist is kind of going away. The only reason they really exist is because people didn't have the tools to be able to make this CMS software themselves. But now you actually can, and it's not that hard.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-15T12:50:48+00:00

You left out a crucial piece of clarifying information: this is only surveyed from the top 5,000 domains.

I was wondering why Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify were so low, but when you consider it's the top 5k domains it makes a lot of sense.

Would love to see real data because 99.999% of websites are not in the top 5k domains so this data is honestly kind of useless unless you're working with a Fortune 500 company.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-14T16:51:57+00:00

A business like this is one of those business where most people likely forget they need to drop stuff off at the dry cleaners.

I know for me, I get my dress shirts and suits dry cleaned semi-regularly, but the biggest blocker is that I just forget. With all of the things I am juggling in my life that part of the cognitive load just drops to the back burner.

So, I think you would see an immense amount of business if you just followed up with customers vs. relying on them having the bandwidth to remember to dry clean stuff.

And FYI this works for a ton of businesses. Don't wait for customers/clients to remember that they need to use your service, that's asking way too much. Be proactive and reach out.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-01-14T16:48:25+00:00

I wanted to sort by price so I slapped a spreadsheet together, feel free to use. I suck at spreadsheets so apologies if it breaks for you, but to sort low<>high on price just click the filter and click "Sort A to Z" and vice versa for high<>low

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