A small studio in Christchurch
Freehold is a design studio with one clear idea. Here's how it works, and why the promise is shaped the way it is.
Proper websites, handed over outright
Freehold builds proper websites for small organisations and businesses across Aotearoa, and hands each one over outright. One fair price, nothing monthly, yours to keep and move any time. That's the whole studio in a sentence.
We work differently from most. There's no dashboard to log into and no account to manage. You email us what you want, we build it and host it, and when you need a change you email us again. Freehold runs on a lot of automation, and everything important crosses Jamie's desk.
The promise is the point. You own the site outright, you can walk away with it any time, and nothing about it ties you down. We shaped the studio around that idea, because a website should leave an organisation more independent, not less.
The price is published rather than quoted, and it holds up against the field: what a website really costs in New Zealand is our read of the whole market from providers’ own published pages. The reason there is nothing monthly is explained in full at a website with no monthly fees, and the question underneath both of them is owning vs renting your website.
Worst-day readability, every time
A few ideas sit behind every site we build. They come straight from the support room.
Built for the worst day
The person reading might be newly diagnosed, exhausted, or scared. Large text, high contrast, and plenty of room to breathe are the baseline, not the extra.
One decision at a time
Each part of a page asks for a single clear action. No wall of choices, no hunting through menus for the thing that matters most.
Calm, not urgent
No flashing offers, no pressure, no clutter. A website should feel like a steady hand, especially for the groups whose whole job is steadying people.
Your real content, carried across
Your history, your people, your funders, your stories. Nothing important gets dropped in the rebuild. It's your work, presented properly.
The person behind the studio
Jamie
Designer · Christchurch, Aotearoa
“The website has to work on someone’s hardest day. That's the only standard I care about.”
A designer with a support-work background
Freehold is run by Jamie, a designer in Christchurch. Before design, Jamie spent years in frontline community and disability-sector support work, and that's where the studio's whole approach comes from.
In support work you learn what it's like to read something on the hardest day of your life, on a phone, when you're tired and worried and just need one clear next step. Every site the studio builds is made for that reader first, whoever the site is for.
That background shapes the promise too. In support work, the goal was always for people to end up more capable and less reliant on anyone. Freehold is built the same way. You own the site outright, you can walk away with it any time, and nothing about it ties you down.
Examples, shared with care
Every rebuild we make starts as a private preview, sent only to the organisation it was built for. Many of them include photos of real people, including children, published with the group's own consent for their own audience.
Because of that, we don't show those previews publicly here. It wouldn't be fair to the people in them. Instead, we share examples only once a group has agreed to be shown, and only in the way they're comfortable with.
Case studies will appear here as organisations agree to be featured. If you'd like to see relevant examples before deciding, just ask and we'll share what we can, privately.
Email us any time
If you run a small organisation or business in Aotearoa and any of this sounds like what you need, flick us an email. There's never a cost to ask, and never any pressure to go ahead.