About Us
We are organized as a worker-owned cooperative. However, we are not legally structred as such. We currently operate as a worker-owned cooperative, focusing on consensus building, profit sharing, and community involvement.
It’s our mission — “To mindfully use technology, digital design, and digital strategy for the benefit of people and planet, while simplifying the tech needs and expenses of social entrepreneurs, nonprofits, NGOs, and fellow cooperatives.”
We are happy to recommend other agencies or freelancer who may be a good fit for your project!
We love that they are open source, their mission of democratizing publishing and their values of caring and giving.
As for you, working from one platform keeps Fresh Ink’s scope and expertise focused. With this platform we are able to continually develop a framework as a strong starting point for projects, use and adapt processes for the four phases of projects, and keep cost within the range of those we aim to serve.
Additionally Fresh Ink offers IT projects or support to transition teams from local VPN’s / MS Office / Active directory to the cloud via G Suite and applicable tools, training, and remote support.
We are fully remote and available for meetings in much of the PNW, as well as where we reside:
- Seattle, WA – Samantha Foust
- Seattle, WA – Daniel Arrañaga
- Lipjan, Kosovo – Liridona Arifi
- Fort Collins, CO – Otto Vosberg
Samantha frequently travels and meets with clients in the Bay Area and New York.
For flexibility, anti-oppression, and diversity.
In various ways, we do one pro-bono project per quarter, Samantha volunteers 3 hours a week when in the US and we are growing funds to provide paid time for volunteer work!
Absolutely, let us know what size and type of project and we will pass along contact information for a related project.
Our Work
We bill projects flat-rate with a typical range between $5k-$40k. Project management, training, and meetings are included and free of charge in this pricing model. Maintenance and ongoing work is billed flat-rate as well. Flat rates are set with our sliding scale rates — $100/hr for nonprofits / NGOS, $115 for cooperatives, and $125 for B Corps / Social Enterprise.
Projects are billed 50% upon kickoff and 50% at delivery, Net 10 for kickoff and Net 45 for delivery. Support work and hosting is billed at the start of each month for the work rendered in that month. Pricing is flexible and non-interest payment plans may be available.
Each quarter one nonprofit is selected for a pro-bono project, all prior and active clients cast votes to decide whom we work with!
All of us to some degree. Samantha is the design lead and project manager, Otto and Liridona work in development / quality assurance, and Daniel is involved in training, discovery, strategy, and IT.
For web projects our approach is content-first and discovery heavy. We tailor questionnaires for your team, complete a web audit of your current presence, and workshop with your team on business strategy and content. Once this phase is completed we kick-off and move through design, development, and delivery phases with clearly defined deadlines and outcomes.
We encourage engagement in the process and provide a login to our project management platform Trello. Project feedback is highly collaborative and at set iterative points in your project.
We aim to limit or remove the need for design revisions by leveraging a thorough discovery process, conducting a cost-benefit and competitive analysis, a review of other designs to sync our expectations, and advising clients put a strong preference on project outcomes over personal preferences. Design is often subjective, using statistics to measure outcomes puts the focus on successfully meeting out collaboratively determined outcomes.
Web projects are completed in tight cycles — once the discovery phase is complete kick-off scheduling is set and depending on the project size and current workload we deliver in 4-10 weeks.
We do ask you for you to complete pre-kickoff work to ensure a smooth and efficient project, the time on this depends on your current content and the needs. We provide content guides before internal project kickoff and support you in this process quite a bit. This usually take more time than you expect, please set aside 10-50 hours of your time to create the content needed, that we outline and work on together.
During the project, we request 1-3 hours of your time each week to help ensure a smooth delivery and solid outcomes.
Yes! We design mobile-first, and always pass Google mobile tests. Depending on project scope, we can design special features only relevant to mobile or desktop users.
We prefer to host in our environment, depending on your site traffic / size cost is low and typically between $20-$80. Maintenance typically ranges from $100-$200 a month. Clients are always empowered to use any host of their choice.
As for maintenance, we train you to update everything you need and offer free emergency support for the sites life — including plugin updates if there is news of critical security flaws with them. We offer ongoing maintenance work and projects as desired.
Absolutely, this is outlined in the contract we send over upon project acceptance.
We work in WordPress and develop with HTML5, CSS3, Javascript and PHP. We use a handful of our favorite tools for digital collaboration — G Suite, Trello, and Xero.
We like the code editors Atom and Sublime, we sync to servers preferably with SFTP or SSH, and depending on the project we may push updates with Git or from a staging environment. We use Adobe Suite and Affinity Designer. We all use some mix of Linux, Mac, Windows, Chrome OS, iOS, and Droid.
If you require different tech, get in touch and we’ll make some recommendations and provide a guide for you on properly vetting web agencies.