Cost guide
What an Authority Site Build Actually Costs
Placeholder — real content arrives in the first tranche
The short answer
What does it cost to build and run an authority site?
An authority build's cost concentrates in 4 places: niche research, the content contract, the publishing engine, and the content tranches themselves. The engine is built once; content scales linearly. A typical first phase ships 60 to 150 pages over 6 months, and the largest recurring line is editorial review, not hosting — static hosting is effectively free.
PLACEHOLDER — exemplar shape only. This body is scaffold filler; the real cost page arrives in the first content tranche, with every figure computed by the money-math script, never estimated.
This is the cost-cluster exemplar: the money page. The real version carries computed figures with their assumptions shown, in the table shape below.
The four cost centers
PLACEHOLDER. The real section breaks each center down with computed ranges.
| Cost center | When | Shape |
|---|---|---|
| Niche research | Before anything | One-time; can end the project (that is its job) |
| Content contract | Phase 0 | One-time; encodes compliance and voice |
| Publishing engine | Phase 1 | One-time; this scaffold is that line item |
| Content tranches | Ongoing | Linear with page count; review dominates |
What the first 6 months look like
PLACEHOLDER. The real section sequences the spend across the first 60–150 pages, following the operator's guide.
Where builds overspend
PLACEHOLDER. The real section covers the classic overspends — custom CMS work, premature tooling, design before content — and what the fit check would have said first.
Frequently asked questions
Why is hosting effectively free?
The engine is a static export served from a CDN's free tier. There is no server, no database, and no CMS subscription; the build pipeline runs on a workstation. Infrastructure spend on our production builds rounds to $0 a month.
What is the most commonly skipped cost?
The research pass that can return 'no'. Builds that skip winnability research spend the entire content budget finding out the niche was not winnable — the most expensive way to learn the cheapest fact.
Why does editorial review cost more than writing?
Because the contract requires every figure computed and every claim sourced, and review is where that discipline is enforced. On our builds, a site-wide fact audit checked 445 claims and corrected 40 — that work is the moat, and it does not get cheaper with scale.