The numbers
What running this costs – and what no longer falls due
The interesting figure is not the build, it is what keeps running every month afterwards. That is where a website turns out to be either a tool or a subscription.
See the running costs – item by item
| What falls due in a year | With an agency | Run in house |
|---|---|---|
| Retainer | €800 – 2,000 per month | none |
| CMS licences and extensions | €30 – 120 per month | none |
| A text change, say a price or a sentence | €45 – 150 per request, 1 to 5 days of waiting | in house, about 5 minutes |
| A new landing page | €800 – 3,000, 2 to 4 weeks | in house, about 2 hours |
| A social post adapted for five channels | €80 – 250 per post | in house, about 20 minutes |
| Hosting | €50 – 200 per month | around €15 per month |
| Per year, at two changes a month | €11,000 – 29,000 | around €180 |
Where these figures come from: Typical market rates for the German Mittelstand, deliberately set at the lower end – not quotes obtained for this purpose. Anyone paying more will find the gap larger, not smaller.
The real gain is not the money. It is response time. When a price change takes five minutes instead of five days, it changes how often anything gets changed at all. Sites that are expensive to maintain go stale – not through neglect, but because every small edit requires a decision.
And what would building it have cost?
| Component | At a Mittelstand agency |
|---|---|
| Website: 117 pages, bespoke design system, copy, SEO architecture | €25,000 – 45,000 |
| Editorial system instead of WordPress | €15,000 – 30,000 |
| KI-News online newspaper with editorial pipeline and newsletter | €8,000 – 15,000 |
| Sales funnel: lead cockpit, segmentation, approval workflow | €12,000 – 25,000 |
| Business check: question logic, evaluation, result document | €8,000 – 18,000 |
| Automation and CRM: flows and the data model behind them | €10,000 – 20,000 |
| Total | €78,000 – 153,000 |
Deliberately calculated at the lower end. These are the orders of magnitude mid-sized German agencies quote – not quotes obtained for this purpose. An owner-run agency with its own creative team charges considerably more. The range is there to show the scale, not to impress.
The point is not the total. It would have been affordable. The point is that these six systems took one person twelve months, alongside the day job, with AI as the tool. That is what I stand for: one experienced person now delivers what used to need a team.
The parts
What was built, one by one
Each part has its own page with the starting point, the build, the decisions and what comes next. If you are in a hurry, read only the figure under each card.
Website
117 pages in German and English, an in-house design system, a long-tail architecture. No builder, no theme, no third-party extensions.
Nepulus web
Our own AI on this website. It answers visitor questions instantly and sticks to reviewed statements. Try it on the German pages, bottom right.
Editorial system
An in-house CMS instead of WordPress. Existing pages stay untouched, only text passages are replaced – with a backup before every change.
Online newspaper
A news portal with an editorial pipeline, four language versions and a weekly newsletter – fed from the same data.
Sales funnel
A working cockpit for lead qualification: 6,718 companies, segmentation, a daily mode and an approval step. In service since 13 August 2026 – 231 letters, 26 replies, 4 meetings.
Business check
A rule-based guide that walks a company through its situation and returns a defensible result – without open chatbot logic.
Automation & CRM
Research, preparation and data upkeep run on an in-house server. The CRM holds the contacts – the logic deliberately lives in one place.
Social media
The next step: one topic becomes five channel versions, gets approved and is published automatically. Planning is running, publishing is not switched on yet.
How they fit together
Why this is a system and not a collection
The parts were not built next to each other but onto each other. Each draws on the same data and the same design system.
The value is not in the individual applications. It is that someone thought the chain through as a whole – from the first search term to the record in the CRM – and then went and built it. That combination of commercial judgement and hands-on delivery is what I bring to a company.
Take it with you
All references as a PDF
The full overview with every figure and every breakdown – laid out for A4, without navigation or controls. To pass on, to file or to print.