Boundaries in Business
Each time you honor your boundaries, you reinforce a healthier dynamic with your clients and with yourself.
So you hop on the bandwagon, only to realize that — hold on — there are so many hidden costs!
- Website on Squarespace or Wix? $25-40/month.
- Custom email? $6-12/account/month.
- Email marketing? $15-50/month.
- Selling courses? $40-200/month.
- Automations? $20-50/month.
- Plus transaction fees.
- Plus domain fees.
- Plus, plus, plus…
You could easily spend $100 USD per month before you’ve made a single dollar. Add up the amount of time you’ll have to invest figuring out each platform and I wouldn’t blame you if your head is already spinning.
Even worse: your business is now locked into their databases, boxed inside their templates, with very little room for growing out of the rails they’ve put in place. Forget about ever needing something truly custom unless you love pain. With your data now stuck in their servers, good luck trying to move out of them.
Wouldn’t it be better if getting started didn’t cost this much? If your platform could grow with you, rather than holding you hostage?
The good news is: we live in the future. And in the future, you don’t need to pay rent to these platforms. With a little bit of ingenuity (and some coding skills), it is now possible to build a fully custom business system with $0 monthly overhead.
In practice
When I built Sofia’s platform, she was already juggling Youtube, private classes, flashcards and courses; but to create the exact system she wanted, the platforms wanted to charge her hundreds a month just to start.
Looking for a more affordable solution in the long run, I built her a lean custom setup:
- A fast, fully-custom website (Astro).
- Free hosting that scales (Netlify).
- Free custom emails (Cloudflare).
- Free email sequences (Resend).
- Custom integration with Mailchimp.
- Product sales through Gumroad.
Cost to run? Practically $0. Savings? Over $1200 a year compared to Kajabi or Teachable. More importantly: she owns the whole thing! Free from algorithm traps and unnecessary costs. Free to grow on her own terms.
This is what I like to call a Digital Home — your own space on the web. Here’s what she has to say about it:
“Working with Sergio has been transformative for my business. He brought clarity, structure, and creativity where I had been feeling stuck. He doesn’t just build systems — he helps you see the bigger picture and connect your vision with the people you want to reach.”
