Four tenants, four sites, one dashboard

The landlord who owns the strip mall where LuAnn's diner sits called me in April. Four of his tenants want websites, the nail place, the vape shop, the tailor, and a mattress store, and he wants one bill and one person to call. That's me. I keep six sites across four different builders, which means six logins, six invoices, and six places to forget a renewal.

So I did what I should have done years ago. I spent $19 and a weekend testing Duda, which is the platform built for exactly this. One dashboard, every client site in one place, one bill I can pass along. I paid for one month of Duda Basic and let it go. Not because it's bad. Because of what I found on day three, which I'll get to.

What it costs

Duda is not pretending to be free. Basic runs $19 a month on the annual plan for one site and one user. Team is $29 for five sites. Agency is $52 for more sites and client management tools, and the White Label tier at $149 is for shops that resell the whole thing under their own name. There's no free plan, just a 14-day trial.

Those prices are real money compared to a WordPress site, and they're aimed at people doing this for a living. The white-label part is the honest appeal. Your dashboard, your logo, your invoices. The client never sees Duda's name anywhere.

The weekend I tested it

1. Started the trial, then paid one month of Basic, $19, to see the real interface past the tour.
2. Built the tailor's site inside a day. The drag-and-drop editor is serious, and the mobile controls are the best I've used, which matters because three of the four tenants are phone-first businesses.
3. Used the AI assistant for first drafts of the boring copy. Hours saved. Some of the drafts were weird, all of them were editable.
4. Set up the client billing so the landlord gets one itemized bill and I stop chasing four envelopes.
5. Day three I hit the blogging tool, because the tailor wants a lookbook and the vape shop wants changes posted monthly. Duda's blogging is the weakest part of the whole thing. Thin editor, no community of plugins behind it, nothing like what I run on WordPress for LuAnn.

That was the wall. Three of my four clients would live inside a feature Duda treats as an afterthought. I finished the month, exported my notes, and went back to my mixed mess of builders. Total cost of finding that out: $19 and a weekend, which I consider cheap tuition.

The panel version

Duda is the control panel for a strip mall roof. One thermostat bank, four rooftop units, and a tech who can see every unit's status from one wall instead of climbing four ladders. If you're managing buildings, that panel is worth real money every month.

If you own one building with one furnace, it's a fancy way to look at a dial. My six sites aren't four tenants with the same needs. They're four different machines from different eras, and the panel that fits them is a folder full of logins. That's the trade: Duda wants your whole fleet, and my fleet is a junk drawer.

The pricing complaint shows up in every review and I'll confirm it: this is more expensive than a builder for one site, and the blogging limits are real. The praise is real too. Mobile performance, the white label, and the fact that the company sells to professionals, so the features are the ones a professional actually uses.

What to do Monday

If you keep more than three sites for other people, count the minutes you spend logging into each one in a month. Write that number down tonight. If it's over an hour, start Duda's 14-day trial and build your worst-maintained site in it before you decide anything. If it's under an hour, keep your folder of logins and don't pay for a panel you don't need.