u/iKontact

I've been a full stack developer for about 5 years working mainly with Laravel, React, and AWS.

I recently built a site for my brother's business, and it made me start seriously considering opening a small web agency/freelance business instead of continuing traditional employment.

For those running agencies or freelancing in 2026:

• Is the market still strong with AI tools becoming so common?
• How do you handle pricing and scope?
• Do you use frameworks/custom stacks or mostly no-code tools?
• How do you structure hosting, maintenance, and billing?
• What do you wish you knew before starting?

Would especially appreciate insight from developers who transitioned from employment into client work.

So I've been a Full Stack Web Developer for about 5 years now. Primarily specialize in Laravel & React. Also I know my way around AWS pretty well.

I recently built a website for my brother, and while I don't think it's perfect - and it still needs some work (waiting on him to give me a proper logo, pictures, and social media links), but I don't think it turned out too bad either.

He suggested I should start my own company so I've been thinking about it. Rather than working for someone else.

Anyways, this made me have a quite a few questions if you wouldn't mind answering even a few:

1. What's it like owning a web design company for those who do?
2. What are things you wish you would've known prior?
3. Is it still viable in 2026? Especially with AI tools like Claude Code, Github Copilot, etc. so readily available.
4. Do these new AI tools force you all to lower pricing to be competitive? Or does it make it so clients haggle on pricing more?
5. How do you price things/determine how to price things for what each person wants? Is it a set amount? A "feels like"? Or how do you determine pricing?
6. From research I've done it seems a lot of people charge around $2,500 minimum for basic 5 page website & around $300 a page afterwards? But then there's things like - what if they need database support, what if they want a contact form with emailing, what if they want a CRM, etc.?
7. What tools do you use for your company? Do you just set them with tools like SquareSpace? If so is that exclusive? Or do you do everything more like a job would be, with a proper frontend and backend framework and hosting like AWS?
8. How does billing work? Do you setup the hosting in your name and they pay monthly? Or do they pay? And if using AWS how does it work if you need to perform maintenance? Do you have passwords/access to their accounts to SSH in, etc?

Anyways, I'm still new to this obviously, so sorry in advance if my questions don't make much sense. Would appreciate any advice!