What an Upstate SC Web Developer Costs: $300/hr, Flat

Most people who ask "how much does a website cost" never get a real number. They get "it depends," a discovery call, a tiered pricing page with the good stuff hidden behind "Contact us," and a quote that somehow lands right at the top of whatever budget they mentioned. The vagueness isn't an accident. It's how a lot of shops keep room to charge you what they think they can get.

I do it the other way. I'm Matt Ebersole, I build custom web and operations systems for Upstate South Carolina businesses, and my rate is public: a flat $300 an hour for all work. One rate, one number, no tiers, no negotiation. Here's exactly what that means and why I price it that way — so you can decide if it's right for you before you ever pick up the phone.

One rate for everything

A lot of agencies quote you different rates for different work — a cheap number for "design," a higher one for "development," a premium for "strategy," a separate line for "project management." It looks like detail. Mostly it's a way to pad the parts you can't easily check.

I charge $300 an hour whether the hour is spent designing a page, writing the code behind it, configuring a server, fixing something at 9 PM, or sitting across from you working out what you actually need. The work is the work. Splitting it into tiers just gives the bill more places to hide.

What an hour actually buys

Twenty-plus years of building this stuff means an hour of my time isn't an hour of figuring it out. It's an hour of someone who's done it before — moving fast because the mistakes already got made on somebody else's clock years ago.

To make that concrete, here's a real build. Upstate Structural Repair, a foundation-repair company running eight trucks, came to me after getting burned twice — once by a developer who locked them out of the system he built, and once by an off-the-shelf platform that leaked job pricing to the wrong people and started a fight inside the company. They'd gone back to paper.

What the hours bought them: a custom inventory system tracking 137 line items across 8 trucks, with 3 enforced access roles so the field crews see zero pricing. A working demo and full proposal in 48 hours from first requirements. Live on their own domain inside three weeks. And a monthly bill, forever, of zero — because they own it outright. No subscription to me, no subscription to anybody.

That's what the rate is attached to. Not hours on a timesheet — outcomes you keep.

How much will my project cost?

The honest answer is that the rate is fixed but the hours depend on the job, and I won't pretend otherwise. What I will do is tell you the truth before you spend a dollar.

Here's how it works. You tell me what you're trying to build or fix. I scope it and give you an honest estimate of the hours — not a lowball to win the work and not a padded number to protect myself. A small site or a focused fix is a handful of hours. A full operations system like USR's is more, but it's bounded, and you'll know the shape of it before we start. If a project starts drifting past the estimate, you hear about it while it's happening, not in a surprise invoice.

The two-day USR demo gives you a sense of the scale: a serious, working system — not a mockup — built in the kind of timeframe where the math stays in plain sight.

The terms, stated plainly

No surprises means putting the whole arrangement on the table:

Half up front. Payment before work begins. This isn't me being difficult — it's how a one-person shop stays solvent enough to do your job right instead of juggling it against three others to make rent. It also means we're both committed before anyone starts.

You own everything at the end. The code, the design, the hosting setup, the data — all yours. No license that expires, no platform you're renting back from me, no version of "we built it so we hold the keys." When it's done, you could never call me again and everything keeps running. (USR's previous developer locked them out. That's exactly the failure I price against.)

No subscription to me. I don't bolt a monthly fee onto the back of a build. Landmark Baptist owns a site serving 12 sermon recordings and a live prayer system holding 61 prayer entries — $0/month, fully theirs. The recurring number on my work is zero, on purpose.

Why I keep the price public

A business that sells you ownership shouldn't hide its own numbers. I tell clients to own their software instead of renting it forever, to insist on transparency, to refuse the deal where someone else holds the keys. It would be hard to say all that with a straight face while running a "contact us for pricing" page and quoting each client whatever I figured they'd pay.

So the rate lives in the open. $300 an hour, half up front, you own everything. If you call me, you already know the number — we can skip straight to whether the project makes sense.

Is $300/hr right for you?

Sometimes the answer is no, and I'll tell you that too. If what you need is a simple brochure site and nothing more, a template tool might serve you fine and cost less — go use it with my blessing. The flat rate earns its keep when ownership, custom fit, and not getting locked in actually matter to your business: an operations system, a tool you'll depend on daily, something an off-the-shelf product can't quite do or keeps you renting forever.

If that's the kind of thing you're weighing, the rate is the easy part — it's public and it's fixed. The real question is whether owning the thing beats renting it, and that's the conversation worth having.

The one thing to do this week

Take the project that's been sitting on your list — the site, the system, the fix you keep putting off because you don't know what it'll cost. Write down, in two or three sentences, what it needs to do.

That's enough for a straight answer. Send it over and I'll tell you the honest scope, the rough hours at $300 each, and whether it's even worth building versus a cheaper route. No discovery-call runaround, no quote shaped to your budget. Just the number.

Truth before tools. Order before growth. People before platforms.

→ See the full rate card, or reply and tell me in two sentences what you're trying to build.

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Matt Ebersole is a digital infrastructure builder in Greer, South Carolina, serving Greenville, Spartanburg, and the Upstate. He builds custom web and operations systems that clients own outright — flat $300/hr, no subscriptions to him.