Portfolio sites for artists & galleries

Saatchi takes 40%. Your own site takes nothing.

A painting sold for $1,500 on a marketplace leaves $600 there. I build the site that takes those sales directly — every work on its own address, priced, indexed, reachable by email. Built by hand, handed over to you, and hosted for €0 a month.

256.9 MB → 7.5 MB Build size after rebuild
25 → 2,542 Characters of text in the gallery HTML
7 → 36 Addresses a search engine can index
€0 Hosting, per month

Measured on budzko.art, September 2026. Not estimates.

Case 01

B.K. Art Studio

An oil painter with 29 works, selling through a marketplace that takes 40%.

budzko.art ↗

Before

A 256.9 MB build with a 29 MB 3D model nobody saw. Six of the seven pages did not exist as far as Google was concerned — they were anchors, not addresses. The gallery HTML held 25 characters of text and one link. The contact button handed the visitor off to their mail client; on a phone without one, it did nothing at all.

Built

Rebuilt as a static site: real addresses, prerendered content, a page for every painting with its medium, size, year, price and availability in machine-readable form. Email on the artist's own domain, sending and receiving. An inquiry form on its own backend that names the painting the visitor is asking about, with spam handled by a honeypot and a timing check rather than a captcha.

Result

Thirty-four times smaller. Thirty-six indexable addresses instead of seven. A hundred times more readable text on the gallery page. Inquiries arrive as email with the visitor's address in Reply-To. The whole thing runs on a free Cloudflare plan: €0 per month, indefinitely.

How I work

Three rules I don't bend.

01

Measured, not claimed

A green build log is not a result. Before I tell you something is finished, I check what your server actually sends to a browser. Every figure on this page was produced that way — which is why none of them is a range or a target.

02

Fixed scope, two projects at a time

I don't take a third. A date I can actually keep is worth more to you than a discount, and a site delivered late costs you the show you were building it for.

03

You own all of it

Domain, hosting account, source code, email. Nothing is rented from me, and nothing stops working if we never speak again.

What you get

Your paintings deserve better than a template.

Things you own, not features you rent.

  • Your own domain, with email on it. yourname.com and hello@yourname.com — sending and receiving, not a forwarding trick.
  • A page per work. Title, medium, dimensions, year, price, availability — written so Google can show the price in search results.
  • An inquiry form that reaches you. The painting's name is already in the message. You reply from your phone like any other email.
  • Hosting that costs nothing. Cloudflare's free plan, in your account. No monthly bill, no renewal you forget.
  • The source code. Yours. If we never speak again, another developer can pick it up.

Pricing

Fixed price, fixed scope.

Signature $3,500
  • Up to 5 pages and 30 works
  • A page per work, with product markup
  • Domain, email, DNS, security headers
  • Inquiry form on its own backend
  • Prerendered content, sitemap, Search Console
  • Three weeks
50% to start, 50% on delivery.
Studio $8,500
  • Everything in Signature
  • Unlimited works, filtering by series and year
  • Second language
  • Checkout, or a catalogue you edit yourself
  • Motion design and custom interaction
  • Five weeks
50% to start, 50% on delivery.
Care $40 / month
  • New works added as you paint them
  • Price and availability changes
  • Up to two hours of edits a month
  • I watch the site so you don't have to
Optional. Cancel any time.
Founding clients Two projects at $1,500 The first two Signature sites, at a reduced price, in exchange for a case study and an honest testimonial. Open until 15 October.

Process

Three weeks, four steps.

You see the site on a live address from day three, and you keep seeing it change until it is yours.

01

A call, thirty minutes

I look at what you have now and tell you what I would do and what it would cost. No charge, and no obligation afterwards.

02

Deposit and materials

50% up front. You send photographs of the works and whatever you have written about them. If the texts don't exist, I draft them and you correct me.

03

Weeks one and two — build

From day three the site is live on a test address. You look at it whenever you like and say what is wrong. Two rounds of changes are included.

04

Week three — handover

Your domain, your email, your hosting account, your code. I show you how to ask for a change. Remaining 50% on delivery.

Questions

What artists usually ask.

Can I add new paintings myself?

On Signature, you send me the photograph and the details and I add it — usually the same day. If you would rather do it yourself, a catalogue you can edit is part of Studio.

What if you disappear?

The domain is registered in your name, the hosting account is yours, and the source code is handed to you at the end. Any developer can continue. That is deliberate.

Why not Squarespace or Wix?

They work, and they charge every month forever. They also give your whole collection a single address, so a search for one painting's title finds nothing. That is the difference you are paying for.

Do I have to leave Saatchi or Artfinder?

No. Keep them. The site sits alongside and takes the sales that would otherwise pay 40% commission. One painting sold directly usually covers a good part of the site.

I don't have good photographs.

Then we start there. I will tell you exactly what to shoot and how — daylight, no flash, square on — and it costs nothing but an afternoon.

Who builds it

Photo
coming soon

Aliaksei

I am not a web designer. I am an engineer who spent the last years building systems that had to stay up: content pipelines, Telegram bots, automated video production in Python and n8n. A dozen of them, built end to end. One I built for a client and sold. One is a product of my own that has been live on my servers and taking payments since spring.

That is why your site behaves like infrastructure and not like a brochure. I know what a page weighs, how long it takes to answer, and what it costs to keep alive every month — because I have paid those bills on my own machines, not read about them.

Painting sites came out of that. My wife is an oil painter. Her work was sitting behind a 256 MB website that search engines could not read, so I rebuilt it properly, measured everything, and discovered that most artists are in exactly the same position — paying a marketplace 40% because the alternative looked complicated.

I work alone and take two projects at a time. You talk to the person building the thing, and every claim I make about your site is a measurement you can check yourself.

12 systems built and shipped 1 sold to a client, run in production 1 product of my own, live and taking payments

Contact

Send me a link to your work.

Your Instagram, your Saatchi page, your old site — whatever exists. I will look at it and reply with what I would do and what it would cost. That reply is free and there is nothing to sign.

hello@369aether.net

Replies within one working day. English or Russian.