What AELIONIX's Growth Plans Actually Cost (And Why a One-Off Price Is the Wrong Question)

Ask five Lagos agencies what a website and real online growth actually costs, and you'll get five different answers — because most are still quoting a one-off build price, then leaving you to figure out SEO, content, and upkeep separately afterward. Here's a clearer way to think about the real, ongoing cost, and the actual numbers behind it.

A website that launches and is never touched again quietly decays — a plugin breaks, rankings slip, content goes stale, and six months later you're paying for a redesign instead of growth. The honest cost of a website was never really "how much to build it" — it's "how much to build it and keep it actually working for you." Most one-off quotes hide the second half of that cost entirely, which is exactly why a client who paid for a one-off build eighteen months ago often comes to us with a site that technically still loads but hasn't moved the needle on enquiries in over a year.

Three monthly plans, each covering website, SEO, content and automation together under one fee — no separate invoices for five different services from five different people:

• Launch — ₦150,000/month. For a business with no website or an embarrassing one: a 5-page professional site built in month 1, hosting and maintenance, Google Business Profile setup, local SEO basics, WhatsApp integration, a basic FAQ chatbot, and monthly reporting.
• Growth — ₦300,000/month. For a business getting some customers online but leaving money on the table: everything in Launch, plus a 10-page site with full sales copywriting, ongoing SEO, 4 blog posts a month, email marketing, automated lead follow-up, and a monthly strategy call.
• Dominate — from ₦550,000/month. For an established business ready to scale aggressively: everything in Growth, plus unlimited pages, full brand identity, a custom AI employee handling leads 24/7, ads management, and a business intelligence dashboard.

Every plan runs a 6-month minimum, then continues month-to-month — enough time for SEO and content to actually compound, rather than a one-off build that stops improving the day it launches.

Launch tends to fit a business right after CAC registration or one that's been running on WhatsApp and social alone and finally needs a real, credible web presence — the 5-page site (typically home, about, services, a proof/testimonials page, and contact) covers what a first-time visitor needs to trust the business enough to reach out. Growth fits a business that already has some traction — a working website or a decent social following — but is leaving money on the table because nothing is actively driving new search traffic or nurturing leads who don't convert on the first visit; the 4 blog posts a month and ongoing SEO are what compound month over month in a way a static site never does. Dominate fits a business at the stage where hand-managing leads, ads, and content has become the actual bottleneck to growing further — the custom AI employee and BI dashboard exist specifically to remove that ceiling.

Dominate starts at ₦550,000/month because unlimited pages, full brand identity work, and ads management scale with the actual size and ambition of the business — an established retailer running ads across three product lines needs a different scope than a single-location service business automating its lead handling, even though both fit the Dominate tier. The starting figure is real and it's the floor, not a teaser number that balloons once you're in a conversation — a specific quote for your situation is worked out from what your business actually needs at this scale, not from a generic package.

Launch's month-1 website build — 5 pages, mobile-optimised, professionally built — would run roughly ₦350,000 as a standalone one-off project. On the retainer, it's included in your first month's fee, because the value to us is the ongoing relationship, not a single invoice. Compare the totals honestly: a one-off ₦350,000 site with no SEO, no content, and no upkeep versus ₦150,000/month with all three included — the retainer earns back its cost the moment it starts generating enquiries a static site never would have. Run the same comparison forward six months: a one-off build costs ₦350,000 once and then nothing improves; six months of Launch costs ₦900,000 total but includes six months of local SEO work, monthly reporting, hosting, and maintenance the one-off price never covered in the first place.

The Growth Plans cover the ongoing work almost every business needs, but a few things sit outside them as genuine add-ons rather than being bundled in at every tier: an extra blog post beyond your plan's monthly allocation costs ₦30,000 per post, a one-off VAPT (vulnerability assessment and penetration testing) security audit costs ₦200,000, and a standalone rebrand package costs ₦180,000. These exist as add-ons specifically because they're either occasional needs (a security audit doesn't need to happen monthly) or genuinely separate scopes of work (a full rebrand is a different kind of project than ongoing content and SEO), not because the core plans were built to feel thin without upsells.

SEO and content compounding is real, but it isn't instant — a new page can take a couple of months just to start ranking for a realistic phrase, and a monthly content and outreach cadence needs a few cycles before its pattern is visible in the data. A 1-month or 3-month commitment would end right around the point results start becoming measurable, which serves neither side well. After the initial 6 months, plans move to month-to-month specifically because at that point the relationship should be earning its keep on results, not on a remaining contract term.

Domain renewal, hosting renewal, an SSL certificate, and the very real risk of a freelancer or small studio becoming unreachable a year after handover are all costs and risks that sit outside a typical one-off quote, and business owners often only discover them when something breaks and there's nobody left to call. On a Growth Plan, hosting and maintenance are already part of the monthly fee at every tier, which means there's no separate renewal invoice landing unexpectedly in month thirteen, and no scramble to find whoever built the site originally when a plugin update breaks something. That ongoing accountability is part of what the monthly fee is actually paying for, even though it's easy to overlook next to the more visible line items like page count and blog posts.

Our ESCT University project is the clearest example we have of what focused, ongoing work can actually produce: their site went down right before a national competition, we completed an emergency recovery and full rebuild in under 72 hours, they ranked #1 on Google for their target keywords within three weeks, and the rebuilt site has held a 97 PageSpeed score with zero downtime since. That kind of result depends on continuous attention — monitoring, SEO, performance — not a project that ends at launch, which is the entire argument for a retainer model over a one-off build in the first place. The full story is worth reading if you want the specifics.

A freelancer can be genuinely cheaper upfront and is a reasonable choice for a narrowly scoped, one-time project, but the tradeoffs are worth understanding before committing — ongoing SEO, ongoing content, and reliable long-term availability are usually where a single freelancer's capacity runs out. A DIY builder can work for a genuinely early-stage business validating an idea on close to zero budget, but there's a real point where DIY stops being the cheaper option once the time cost of managing it yourself outweighs what a retainer would have cost. Neither comparison is about dismissing the alternative — it's about matching the option to the actual stage your business is at.

Rather than guess, answer a few questions about what you actually need and get a specific plan recommendation — not a generic "it depends." If you're still unsure after that, a short call clarifies it faster than reading another comparison page.

The real cost of "I'll just get a cheap site built" isn't the invoice — it's every month after launch where nobody's maintaining it, improving its SEO, or turning visitors into leads. That ongoing work is the actual product; the website is just where it lives.

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The Growth Plans are built around the retainer model because the ongoing SEO, content, and maintenance are where most of the actual value compounds over time — a website that launches and is never touched again tends to lose ground within months. Book a consultation to talk through your specific situation if a one-off scope is genuinely what you need.

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The plan continues month-to-month with no further lock-in, and you can adjust or cancel from that point. The 6-month minimum exists because SEO and content need that runway to start showing measurable results, not as a way to lock you in indefinitely.

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Yes — businesses commonly start on Launch and move up once they outgrow it, which is a normal part of how this is meant to work rather than an exception. Upgrading brings in the additional pages, content volume, and features of the higher tier from that point forward.

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No — that figure only illustrates what the month-1 Launch website would cost if built as a standalone one-off project, to show how much value is bundled into the first month's ₦150,000 retainer fee. It isn't a separate one-off pricing option.

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Generally these add-ons are priced and delivered in the context of an active Growth Plan, since they're most useful alongside the ongoing work a retainer already covers. Book a consultation to discuss a specific need outside an existing plan.

See the full plan breakdown or book a free consultation to talk through what makes sense for your business specifically.