Hi Roy,
Thanks for sharing! I think it's great that more orgs/folks are trying to make the Web more accessible.
I'm also a web dev with some experience, and I've done a few accessibility projects, both in-house and with third-party consultants.
My main feedback is this: I would've loved to have been able to outsource to/partner up with experts for more of that work, but that would've been difficult at your prices. €2k-€4.5k/mo was between half and all of my salary as a full-time dev (working for small biz). On an ongoing basis, that would've been quite unaffordable.
If you're truly interested in making "accessibility achievable and affordable for organizations of any size", might you consider a pricing model where it's X dollars for the initial work (where the bulk of it lies, in terms of initial design/audit/etc.), and then a lower Y dollars/mo for maintenance (reviewing some new content and pages, etc.)? Possibly also some sort of allowance/sliding scale for smaller sites or smaller orgs?
In my experience, much of the work is frontloaded. Having to pay the same price month-to-month where subsequent months might not be much work at all is a tough sell. And in my experience, all-included subscription services like this often tend to be "best effort" anyway, especially for smaller customers who are competing for limited dev/design time with your bigger clients. At lower monthly costs, that's still a fair enough value proposition, but at four-figures a month... that's easily the territory where smaller companies might consider in-housing instead. And sure, people could subscribe for just a month or two and then cancel, but that feels disrespectful/dishonest.
In the past accessibility projects we've done, the upfront audits cost a few grand on a mid-sized site. We were presented with various reports and tables (several tens of pages worth), but it was really just a checklist of things we'd go down and address. The actual fixes took about a week of dev time. Then on an ongoing basis, we just followed the same recommendations for our new content, occasionally using free tools like Microsoft's free Accessibility Insights (https://accessibilityinsights.io/) to double-check our pages for problems. These days a lot of it is built into IDEs too.
That's not to say automated checklists are sufficient and can replace human expertise (yet), but they do take care of a lot of the low-hanging fruit, especially for ongoing content updates that follow the same format as previously audited pages/sites.
Now, the above was just my personal experience primarily working for small biz and nonprofits. If you're primarily targeting bigger enterprises or early 2020s-style startups with infinite money, and purposefully trying to exclude smaller customers, that's totally valid and maybe that pricing makes sense? (It's probably cheaper to them vs hiring AAA labor in-house). But for smaller orgs, your prices are often more than their entire website budget and nearly as much as an additional staff person. If you truly want to target them as well, would you consider something that's more suitable for their budgets?
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Altogether separate than the pricing thoughts: It would also be lovely to see some demo reports/audits, or before/after screenshots etc. This is the sort of endeavor where the quality of consulting/auditing can vary a lot between service providers, and being able to see examples of your previous work would mean a lot.
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Thanks again for sharing, and I hope this feedback wasn't too harsh! Just my 2¢ as someone who wishes more companies would voluntarily take this work on.
