A website for your toy library
A toy library website has one job: help the next family find you, see when you're open, and join. This page is our honest offer to the people who run one, usually volunteers, usually stretched. A proper website, built for you, for a one-off price, owned by the library outright, with nothing monthly behind it, ever.
Last updated July 2026
The front doorFacebook is the noticeboard. The website is the front door.
Most toy libraries run on a Facebook page, and for talking to the members you already have, it's genuinely good. The trouble is the families you don't have yet. A parent searching “toy library near me” at nine at night mostly finds websites, not pages. A parent without a Facebook account hits a login wall. And the answers that matter, when you're open, what it costs, how to join, sink down the feed the week after you post them.
A website holds those answers still, where Google and the new AI search tools can find them and a tired parent can read them in one minute. It also reads properly to the people who fund you: a grants committee looking up your library finds a front door, not a feed.
And the honest other side: if your sessions are full, your membership is healthy and your page is humming, you may not need us at all. We'd rather say that here than waste your evening.
What a toy library website actually needs
Not much, done well. When you're open, findable in one glance, and where you are, with the door you actually enter by. How joining works and what it costs, in plain writing. A warm page about who you are, because a toy library is a community before it's a shelf of toys. A link to your catalogue or booking system if you run one, working exactly as it does now. And a way to reach a real person.
What it doesn't need: a login system, a monthly platform plan, or anything a future committee will be afraid to touch. We build small, fast, plain sites on purpose. They cost nothing to keep online, which is why hosting is free, and they keep working whether or not anyone logs into anything.
The changeover problem, solved by ownership
Every volunteer-run library knows the story: the website was set up years ago by someone's partner, the login is lost, the billing was on a card that's since been cancelled, and now nobody can change the opening hours. That's not a technology failure, it's an ownership failure.
Ours is built the other way. The domain is registered in the library's name, never ours. Hosting is free, so there's no subscription to lapse when the treasurer changes. The whole site can be exported free at any time, so you're never locked to us either. Handover to a new committee is one line in the handover folder: “the website, changes by email to the studio, $20 a batch.”
Complete the day it goes live, and it can still grow for years
Here is the honest version of what you get. On the day it goes live, the site is finished: every page written, every answer in place, nothing held back for a second stage. If you never send us another word, it carries on doing its job for as long as you keep the domain, and that costs you nothing further. A site that stays exactly as it is isn't a neglected site, it's one that was right the first time.
It can also grow, because the studio stays behind it. You email us what's new, we draft the change and send it back for you to check, you tell us it's right, and up it goes: $20 for a batch of edits, and small changes can usually be done quickly. 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. Across a few years that becomes something a one-off build never gets to be. New toys photographed and added a batch at a time. A page of its own when the library wins a grant, or when the big toy sale comes round. The story page deepening as the library's own history grows longer. Session times changed the week they actually change, rather than the season after.
Every build can also include a site assistant, which answers a visitor's questions using only the words already on your site, so a parent reading at nine at night gets the same answer you would have given them. It's included in the price and switched on only if you want it. And all of it stays yours either way: the domain in the library's name, nothing monthly, and a free export any time you want to take the whole thing elsewhere.
One flat price, and volunteer-run is what the community rate is for
Our standard price is $800, once. The community rate is $400, for organisations where $800 would genuinely be a stretch, and a volunteer-run toy library is exactly the shape it was written for. Same site, same care, same ownership at either rate, by rule.
The only cost we don't carry: your domain name, about $65 a year, because it must be registered in the library's 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. Whether the community rate applies is a one-line email: 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 an organisation that plans to exist 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, when you're open, and what you have now, even if it's just a Facebook page. We'll be straight about whether we can help and what it would cost.