A website for your farm shop
New Zealand has bought at the gate for as long as there have been gates: eggs in a chilly bin, honey on a shelf, flowers in a bucket, a shed open on Saturdays, a tin for the money. This page is our honest offer to the people running one. A proper website, built for you, for a one-off price, owned by you outright, with nothing monthly behind it, ever.
Last updated July 2026
The front doorYour socials are the noticeboard. The website is the signpost.
Most direct sellers we come across run on an Instagram account or a Facebook page, a sign at the road, and word of mouth. For the people who already follow you, that works, and we would not touch it. The trouble is the ones who don't follow you yet. Someone new to the district, or driving through, picks up their phone and types “eggs near me”, or “honey” and the name of the nearest town. That is a search a social account is close to invisible in, and a roadside sign only reaches the people already on your road.
A website is the piece that search can read: it sits still, it says where you are and when the gate is open, and it can be found by someone who has never heard your name. It also answers at ten at night, when a lot of the looking actually happens. The socials keep doing what they are good at, the daily picture of what came in this morning, and the site points at them.
There is a second reason, and it matters more than the search does. People buy direct partly to know where their food came from. Standing at a gate is a small act of trust, and the story behind it, the family, the block, how long you have been at it, why you do it this way, is the thing that turns a passing car into a regular. You cannot tell that story properly in a caption that scrolls away by Thursday. A website tells it once, properly, and it is still there next year.
And the honest other side: if you sell out at the gate every week with nothing more than a sign and an Instagram, you may not need us. We would rather say that here than waste your evening.
What a farm gate website actually needs
Less than you would think, done properly. Where you are, with directions that work rurally: not just the postal address, because an RD number is a mail delivery detail and it will not put a stranger at your gate. What people need is the road, the RAPID number on the post, which side you are on, how far out of town, and the thing they should actually look for. The white gate. The flag. The second cattle stop past the bridge. Written the way you would tell a friend on the phone.
Then: when you are open, honestly, including the months you are not. Roughly what you sell and when it comes on, because seasons are the shape of your year and people plan around them. How paying works, in one plain sentence. Who you are and where the place is, with photographs of the real thing. A link to your socials for today's picture. And a way to reach a human being.
What it doesn't need: a shop platform, a monthly plan, a login, or a stock system that goes stale the first busy week. We build small, plain, fast sites on purpose. They cost nothing to keep online, which is why hosting is free, and they keep working whether or not anyone remembers a password.
One thing we deliberately leave alone: the rules for selling food are yours to hold, exactly as they are today, and the website changes nothing about them.
The website should be an asset of the farm, not another rental
Nearly everything else in this industry is rented to you. A monthly platform fee, a builder subscription, a designer's account that holds your domain, and the day you stop paying, the site goes dark and takes your address with it. For a business that already carries enough standing charges, that is one more line on the bank statement that never ends.
Ours is built the other way round. The domain is registered in your name, never ours. Hosting is free, so there is no card to lapse and no invoice to forget. The whole site can be exported free at any time, so you are not locked to us either. If you ever sell the block or hand the business on, the website goes with it, the same as the shed and the sign.
Done on day one, and it grows for as long as you want it to
To see what this looks like built, we made a fictional site for a small-town bakery and café: Kōwhai Corner Bakehouse. Every real build starts from your own world, not from that one.
The site is finished when it goes live. Not a starting point, not a shell waiting for you to fill it in on a wet afternoon: complete, true, and ready for the person who searches tonight. If you never change a word of it, it will keep doing that job for years, free, and nobody will chase you for anything.
It can also grow, because we stay behind it. You email us what has changed, we draft it and show you, you say yes, and it goes up. A batch of edits is $20. And if something on the site is wrong, we fix it for nothing, because that is not a change, that is us not having got it right. There is no account to log into, no software to learn, and nobody on the place has to become the website person.
What that looks like across a few seasons, and a few years. The price list refreshed when your prices actually move, not left saying last year's number. A page for the new line the year you add the flowers, or the honey, or the beef by the quarter. The story of the farm deepened a paragraph at a time, until it reads like the place instead of a description of it. Photographs that follow the seasons, so the site in November looks like November. Opening hours changed for the winter, and changed back.
Every build can also include a site assistant: a small helper that answers a visitor's questions using only the words already on your site, so “are you open today?” and “do you take card?” get answered late at night without your phone going. It is included in the price and switched on only if you want it.
All of it stays yours. One price at the start, nothing monthly, and the whole site exportable free whenever you like. Growing it is your choice, never a subscription.
One flat price, published, and then nothing
Our price is $800 for the whole build: the pages, the words, the photographs sorted, the domain set up in your name, and the site live. A farm shop is a working business, so the standard rate is the one we quote, and it is the same number for everybody who can pay it.
The only cost we don't carry: your domain name, about $65 a year, because it must be registered in your name, not ours. That's the deed. Changes later are $20 for a batch of edits, whenever you actually want one, and a year where nothing changes costs nothing.
And the honest part. A very small operation, an honesty box and a couple of dozen eggs a week, where $800 would genuinely be a stretch, is welcome to ask about the $400 community rate. The test is one question: could the business comfortably pay $800? Same site, same care, same ownership either way, by rule. Here is how we make that call.
Asked and answered, plainly
The sums behind the price
What the whole market charges, honestly mapped: what a website really costs in New Zealand. Why owning beats renting for a business that plans to be here in ten years: owning vs renting your website. Whether the $400 rate applies to you: who qualifies for the community rate. The whole process from first email to handover: how it works.
Tell us about it in a sentence
Where you are, what you sell, and what you have now, even if it's just an Instagram and a sign. We'll be straight about whether we can help and what it would cost.