How Does OceanAds Actually Compare?
海水不可斗量數位工作室 (OceanAds) is a digital operations studio based in Taichung, Taiwan, that provides website development, Google Ads management, SEO, and workflow automation for small and medium-sized businesses, built as one system so a brand can launch, take orders, track performance, and iterate. Before you hire anyone — including us — you should see the trade-offs side by side. The tables below include the cells where we lose.
In-house Team vs Traditional Agency vs OceanAds
These are the three realistic ways a Taiwanese SMB gets a working website with traffic behind it. Costs for the in-house and agency columns are market-typical characterizations, not quotes; OceanAds figures are our published prices.
| Dimension | In-house team | Traditional web agency | OceanAds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Upfront cost | Highest — salaries for at least a developer and a marketer, ongoing regardless of output | Mid to high — project fees vary widely; extras often quoted per change | Published tiers from NT$8,800; custom platforms from NT$36,800 |
| Time to first launch | Weeks to months — hiring alone can take longer than the build | Commonly one to three months for a standard site | First version in as little as 7 days; complex platforms 2–4 weeks |
| Source code & account ownership | Fully yours by definition | Varies — hosting and code often stay with the agency, creating switching costs | Source code bought out; cloud, domain and analytics accounts registered in your name |
| Ongoing cost | Salaries continue whether or not work is needed | Monthly retainers and managed-hosting markups are common | Optional plans NT$1,800–NT$2,200/month, or NT$450/hour with no plan at all |
| Marketing integration (Ads + SEO) | Only if you hire for it separately | Often subcontracted; site and marketing teams rarely share data | Same team builds the site, runs Google Ads and SEO, and wires tracking through all of it |
| Automation & AI capability | Depends entirely on who you hired | Rarely offered beyond contact forms | AI integration from NT$8,000; Telegram bots, crawlers, and workflow automation in-house |
| Contract lock-in | None, but employment obligations instead | Annual contracts and proprietary hosting are common | No lock-in; maintenance minimums are 3–6 months and clearly stated |
| Capacity & bandwidth | Dedicated to you full-time — the clear winner for constant, heavy workloads | Large agencies can staff big projects and formal account management | Our honest limit: a small senior team that takes limited concurrent builds; no big account-management layer |
| Best when | Digital IS your product and iteration is daily | You need enterprise process, formal SLAs, on-site meetings at scale | You want to own a fast-moving system without hiring for it |
WordPress / Platform Stores vs Custom Development
WordPress powers roughly 43.4% of all websites, and platform store builders are everywhere — they are popular for good reasons. We rebuilt a jewelry store off WooCommerce in 3 days (case study), so we have seen both the failure modes and the cases where WordPress is simply the right answer.
| Dimension | WordPress / platform store | Custom development (our approach) |
|---|---|---|
| Upfront cost | Lower — templates and plugins keep initial spend small | Higher — from NT$28,800 for a custom storefront |
| Ongoing fees & commissions | Plugin subscriptions, hosting tiers; platforms may add commissions per sale | No commissions; infrastructure billed to you directly at vendor rates |
| Performance under traffic spikes | PHP renders every request and queries the database each time; live-sale spikes of 5,000+ visitors can bring a store down | Architecture chosen for the load pattern — static generation, CDN, edge deployment where it fits |
| Plugin dependency | Typical stores run dozens of plugins; conflicts and stale updates accumulate | No third-party plugin chain; features are code you own |
| Data & customer ownership | On hosted platforms, member and order data live under the platform's rules | Your database, your export, your customer relationships |
| Customization depth | Excellent within template boundaries; painful beyond them — workflows bend to the tool | Database and flows designed around how you already operate — tiered pricing, B2B quoting, rolling VIP levels |
| Content & blogging | Genuinely excellent — for a content site or blog, WordPress is hard to beat | Possible but overkill if content is all you need |
| Who maintains it | Anyone familiar with the ecosystem — a large talent pool, easy to switch vendors | Requires a developer relationship — with us or any developer, since you hold the source |
How to Choose
Our plain advice, including the answers that do not favor us:
- Choose a platform or WordPress if you mainly publish content, sell a handful of simple products, or want to validate an idea for the least possible money. Do not pay for custom development to test whether anyone wants your product.
- Choose an in-house team if digital is your core product and you ship changes daily. No outside studio, including ours, matches a good full-time team's iteration speed.
- Choose a traditional agency if you need enterprise-grade process, formal SLAs, and a large account team — that structure has real value at scale, and we do not offer it.
- Choose OceanAds if you are an SMB that wants one accountable team for site, ads, SEO and automation; wants to own the source code and every account; and wants a first version live in about 7 days for a published price instead of a mystery quote.
A practical test: if your workflows fit a template today but you expect them to outgrow it — tiered wholesale pricing, custom quoting, automation — the honest comparison is not "cheap now vs expensive now" but "rebuild later vs build once." That said, migration off a platform later is a real, routine path too; we have done it in 3 days. Either sequence can be rational. If you tell us your numbers, we will tell you which one we would pick in your position — even when the answer is not us.