White Label Web Design: How It Works, Margins and Risks
How a white label web design project runs, how to work out your real margin and the six risks to cover in writing.
Robbert Veer, Founder
8 min read
White label web design is a model where another company designs and builds a website and your agency sells it under your own name. You keep the client, the price and the responsibility. The partner does the production. Your margin is what remains after the partner's fee and the hours you still spend yourself.
How does white label web design work?
Your agency sells and manages the project, and a partner the client never meets produces it. The work passes through you in both directions.
- You sell the project. You agree on scope and price with the client, under your own contract.
- You write the brief. Pages, content, sites the client likes and the problems the new site has to fix. Our web design questionnaire collects most of it.
- The partner designs. You review the mockups before the client sees them.
- The partner builds. The site sits on a staging address until it is approved.
- You test the build. Use your own checklist, on your own phone.
- The client reviews. You collect the changes and pass them on in one batch.
- The site launches. It goes live on accounts that the client or your agency owns.
Partners differ in how much of this they take on. Some offer white label website design only, which means mockups that you or your developer build. Others offer white label web development, which means they build from a design you supply. Many do both.
Steps 2, 5 and 6 stay with you whoever the partner is. They are your hours, and they belong in the margin.
What margin does white label leave you?
Your real margin is the client price minus the partner's fee, your own hours and the extras, divided by the client price. A margin worked out on the partner's fee alone leaves out the last two.
Two words get mixed up here. Markup is measured against cost. Margin is measured against price. A site bought for $2,400 and sold for $6,000 carries a 150% markup and a 60% margin.
Here is a whole project with made-up figures.
| Line | Made-up figure |
|---|---|
| Client price | $6,000 |
| Partner fee | $2,400 |
| Your hours, 14 at a cost of $60 | $840 |
| Stock photos, licenses and payment fees | $160 |
| What is left | $2,600 |
| Margin on the partner fee alone | 60% |
| Real margin | 43% |
The 14 hours cover the brief, the client meetings, the testing and the launch.
Now add one round of changes beyond the agreed limit. The partner bills $300 and you spend 4 more hours. What is left falls to $2,060, and the margin falls to 34%.
To set a ceiling for the partner's fee, work backward. Multiply the client price by one minus the margin you need, then subtract your hours and extras. At a 45% target, a $6,000 price allows $3,300 of total cost. That leaves $2,300 for the partner.
When we ran this search in November 2026, none of the four ranking pages we could read in full counted the agency's own hours. If the arithmetic fails at your current prices, the fix is the price. Our guide on how much to charge for a website covers that side.
What are the risks of white label web design?
The risks are ownership, client contact, quality, access, delay and margin. Each one can be covered in writing before the first project starts.
| Risk | How it shows up | What covers it |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | The copyright in the design or code stays with the partner | A signed agreement that settles who owns it |
| Client contact | The partner later sells to your client directly | A non-solicitation clause with a time limit |
| Quality | A site under your name breaks on a phone | Your own acceptance checklist |
| Access | Hosting, domain or CMS accounts sit in the partner's name | Accounts opened in the client's name or yours |
| Delay | One partner, one queue, and your deadline slips | A delivery date in the contract and a second partner tried on a small job |
| Margin | Extra revisions are billed to you and you cannot bill them on | The same revision limit in both contracts |
Ownership needs the most care. US copyright law treats a commissioned work as a "work made for hire" only in listed cases. The work must fall into one of nine categories, and both parties must sign a written agreement that says so. If any requirement fails, it is not a work made for hire (U.S. Copyright Office, Circular 30). The nine categories do not mention websites or software. So the words "work for hire" in a partner contract may not settle who owns the site. Ask an attorney whether your contracts need a written transfer of copyright as well. This is not legal advice. Our web design contract template shows where an ownership clause sits.
Quality is your job. The client holds you to the result, so test before they see it, and use Google's own marks as the pass line. Google counts a page as good on three marks, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads. They are a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less, an Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less and a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less (web.dev). A staging site has no visitors yet. Run a lab test such as PageSpeed Insights before launch, then check the real figures a month later. Test the phone layout first, because Google indexes and ranks the mobile version of a site (Google Search Central).
Be straight about who does the work. You do not have to name the partner. Do not claim an in-house team you do not have. "We work with a production partner, and I manage and check everything" is true and answers the question. Read your client contract too, since some clients require consent before work is subcontracted.
When does white label make sense?
White label makes sense when you can sell more sites than you can build, or when clients ask for a site and building is outside your trade.
- An SEO or marketing agency whose client needs a new site before the marketing can work.
- A solo designer with a waiting list.
- An agency handed a project on a platform it does not build on.
It fits poorly in three cases. The design itself is why clients choose you. The project needs daily contact between the client and the builder. Or the margin arithmetic leaves too little at your prices.
The model runs in the other direction as well. A web design agency can resell search work, which we cover in our guide to white label SEO. And once a site is live, ask whether the partner also maintains what it builds. A care plan sold under your name follows the same arithmetic, and our guide to website maintenance plans prices one.
What does white label not solve?
White label does not find you clients. A partner adds capacity to deliver, and capacity earns nothing until a project is sold.
None of those four pages said how the reselling agency finds its clients. Each one assumed the clients were already there.
Start with businesses whose current site is weak. In our study, businesses with the weakest 20% of websites replied positively to a cold email about 3.2 times as often as a random sample of the rest. The study covered Dutch companies and email only, and the method is in our write-up.
Leadodo sits in a different category from a white label partner. It is software that finds businesses, scores their websites and runs outreach to the ones with the weakest sites. Your agency sends under its own name.
The two halves meet in the brief. The weak points you named when you first wrote to the owner are the first lines of the brief you hand your partner.
Questions
Is white label web design the same as outsourcing?
It is one kind of outsourcing. The work is delivered under your brand, and the partner stays out of the client's view. A freelancer you subcontract on those terms is doing white label work too.
Do you have to tell clients you use a white label partner?
That depends on your client contract, so read it. Some contracts require consent before work is subcontracted. Whatever the contract says, do not claim staff you do not have. This is not legal advice.
How much does white label web design cost?
Prices differ widely between partners, and this guide makes no claim about any of them. Ask for a written quote on a real project. Then work out your margin with your own hours included.
Who owns a website built by a white label partner?
Whoever the contracts say. Under US copyright law the person who creates a work is ordinarily its author, and a commissioned work is a work made for hire only in listed cases with a signed agreement. Have both contracts state who owns the design, the code and the accounts. This is not legal advice.
How long does a white label website take?
It depends on the partner's queue, the size of the site and how fast your client approves each stage. Get a delivery date in writing. Then add your own days for the brief, the testing and the client's review.
Can a freelancer use white label web design?
Yes. The model works at any size. At lower prices the margin is thinner, so count your own hours before you quote.
Next step. A partner can build the site. Leadodo finds the businesses that need one and runs your Outbound Machine. See the features.
