The awkward ones included. If your question is not here, ask it — I would rather answer it now than have it sit in the back of your mind through the project.
One person: me. There is no agency behind this page, no account manager, and nobody the work gets quietly handed to. You talk to the person writing the code, which mostly means answers arrive faster and nothing is lost in relay. It also means I am honest about capacity — if I cannot take your deadline, I will say so instead of taking the deposit.
You do — completely, and from the first commit rather than the final payment. The repository is yours, the domain is registered in your name, and the deployment runs on your account if you want it to. There is no licence, no lock-in, and nothing that stops working if you stop paying me. If you want to hand it to another developer next year, you can, and I will help with the handover.
That is a design goal, not an afterthought. It is plain Next.js and TypeScript — no proprietary framework, no visual builder that only I can open. The comments explain why a decision was made rather than what a line does, so the reasoning survives after I am gone. The honest test of a freelancer is not whether the site works on launch day; it is whether it can still be changed a year later by somebody else.
In stages tied to delivery, not one lump sum up front. Typically a third to start, then payments against milestones you can actually look at — a staging URL you open on your phone, not a status report. If you prefer to work through Upwork or Freelancer.com, that is fine and the escrow there handles it. For direct work, bank transfer or Wise.
A single-language site is usually two to four weeks; multilingual is three to six. The variable is almost never the code — it is content. Text, photographs and approvals from your side are what actually set the date, which is why I ask about them in the first message rather than the third week.
You see it long before it is finished, which is the point. There is a preview deployment from the first days — you review something you can click, on your phone, while the scope is still open. Each milestone includes revision rounds against its agreed criteria. The failure mode I am designing against is the one where a client sees the work for the first time at the end, and by then everybody has wasted a month.
Sometimes those are the right answer and I will tell you so — if you need a blog your marketing team edits daily and nothing else, a custom build is an expensive way to buy something you could rent. What they are bad at is the thing I am usually hired for: page speed under real conditions, structured data that stays correct as content changes, and multilingual routing that does not lie to search engines. If a template fits, take the template.
The technical half is built in and not billed separately: structured data, canonical URLs, sitemaps, hreflang and Core Web Vitals all come out of the same schema the pages come from, so they cannot drift out of date when content changes. What I do not do is ongoing content marketing, link building or keyword campaigns. A site that is technically sound will not rank on its own if nobody ever writes anything.
Rarely. I am on UTC+3, which puts my working day fully inside European hours and overlapping the American morning. For Australia and East Asia the overlap is narrower but workable. In practice the thing that matters more than time zones is reply speed, and being one person with no queue in front of you helps more than sharing an office hour.
Nothing you have to buy. The site is yours and runs without me. If you want ongoing work — changes, new pages, monitoring — that is hourly and arranged when you need it, not a subscription you have to cancel. Search rankings take months to settle, so if visibility is the goal, launch is the start of the measurement rather than the end of the project.
The first conversation is free and is not a sales call. If the honest answer is that you do not need me, that is the answer you will get.