005 / QUESTIONS
Productised vs custom web development — and other questions.
The questions buyers actually ask, answered plainly. If yours isn’t here, email [email protected] — the answer might land in this list next week.
What's the difference between productised and custom web development?
Productised means the scope, the included list, and the price are defined before you sign. Custom means each project re-negotiates all three. Productised is faster (two weeks vs two months), lighter on the wallet (no discovery-phase billing), and more predictable (the quote holds). Custom is the right call when a project genuinely doesn't fit a standard service site — a cinema booking system, say, or a multi-tenant SaaS. For a 1–5-person service business that needs a marketing site, productised is the cleaner lane.How much does a website cost in South Africa?
It depends on who you ask, and the honest answer has a shape. Template-based SaaS builders (Wix, Squarespace) run R200–R500/month for a rented site on a platform you don't own. Custom agencies quote R30,000–R200,000 for a service-site build over six to sixteen weeks. Synapse Surge sits in the productised middle — fixed price, fixed scope, code you own. See our pricing page for the full included list. We quote each project against that list.Do you build POPIA compliant websites?
Every Synapse Surge site ships with POPIA baseline in place: a privacy policy (fixed sections verbatim from the Act, variable sections filled from your intake), a cookie consent banner wired to Google Tag Manager Consent Mode v2, and a data-collection disclosure line under every form. POPIA compliance is a baseline, not a tier. Read our own privacy policy for a working example.How long does a website take to build?
Two weeks from sign-off to live on a standard service-site build — brief, quote, build, staging, your review, deploy. Faster is possible when your copy is ready on day one. Slower usually means copy isn't finalised; we flag that in the first week so you can plan around it.Can I edit the site myself after it ships?
Yes, with one gentle caveat. The site is Next.js code in a GitHub repo you own. Text changes, image swaps, and colour tweaks are editable if you're comfortable in code (or have a developer). If you're not, the monthly SEO retainer covers content updates. We skip a CMS by default because CMS-driven sites trade day-one simplicity for long-term maintenance overhead — and we'd rather give you the simpler foundation.Do you host the site, or do I?
We host by default on the same Cloudflare-fronted VPS stack we use for our own site — included in the build price for the first year. You can move to your own hosting any time (the code is yours). If you'd rather self-host from day one, say so in the brief and we'll set up the deploy to your infrastructure instead.What tech stack do you build on?
Next.js 16 (App Router, server components), TypeScript, Tailwind v4, deployed behind Cloudflare with a Cloudflare Origin CA certificate for SSL. Resend for transactional email. Google Analytics 4 + Google Tag Manager with Consent Mode v2 for analytics. The stack is the same one powering the site you're reading right now.What if my project isn't a fit for the productised model?
We'll tell you, honestly. If your brief doesn't fit the productised service site — say, a booking system, a custom CMS, or a full-stack application — we say so on the first reply and point you at people who build that well. Saying no to the wrong project is how we keep saying yes to the right ones on schedule.