01 Pricing
Most studios make you book a call to find out whether you can afford them. These are the real numbers. If your budget is not in this range, you have found that out in ten seconds rather than in a week.
Not VAT registered, so the price you see is the price you pay.
£950
A trade, a single service, or anybody whose current presence is a Facebook page and a phone number.
About two weeks
Most common
£2,400
A business with several services, more than one area, or anything a customer needs to read about before they ring.
Three to four weeks
from £4,800
Bookings, catalogues, calculators, member areas, a site in more than one language, or anything that talks to software you already run.
From six weeks
Half before work starts, half on handover. The price agreed in writing is the price at the end. Changes you ask for inside the agreed scope are included; anything outside it is quoted before it is done, never billed afterwards as a surprise.
02 Afterwards
Optional. Hosting, monitoring, the audits re-run monthly, and small changes included.
Cancel any time. The site is yours either way, and it keeps working if you stop.
03 Everything else
From £2,400 to build. £450 a month to run it.
An audit of the process as it actually runs comes first, and produces a fixed quote. Website scope can be written down before work starts. Process scope cannot, because the cost is in the exceptions and nobody can list their own exceptions from memory.
How automation works£450 for the audit. Fixes quoted from the findings.
A measured report on the site you already have. If the answer is that it is fundamentally fine and needs a day of work, that is what the report says, and the audit fee is the whole of what you spend.
What the audit coversQuoted per build
These vary too much to publish a number honestly. A pipeline that produces a thousand of something, an alerting bot and a thirty second title sequence have nothing in common except that none of them can be priced from a description.
All services04 For context
| Who | A small business site | What the difference buys |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest freelance | £400 to £900 | Usually a theme, and usually no audit, no copy and nobody afterwards. |
| This | £950 to £4,800 | Built from scratch, measured, written, with the legal pages and a handover. |
| UK agency | £3,000 to £8,000 | Comparable work plus account and project management. |
| London agency | £8,000 and up | The same specification with a London office behind it. |
Ranges are from 2026 UK web design pricing surveys. The honest counterpoint to the middle row: an agency has cover when somebody is ill and I do not, which is worth knowing before you choose.
05 Questions
A UK agency quoting the same specification is usually £3,000 to £8,000, and in London more. A good part of that is account managers, project managers and an office. You are dealing with the person doing the work, so the overhead is not there to pay for. The honest counterpoint is that an agency has cover when somebody is ill and I do not, which is worth knowing before you choose.
Less than you think, and it is mostly at the start: what you do, who you want to hear from, any photographs you own, and your real details. I write the copy. If something is missing at build time it appears on the page as a visible marker rather than as filler, so it cannot go live unnoticed.
You do, including the code. It is on your domain and your hosting account, in your name. There is no platform you are locked into and nothing stops working if you stop paying me.
Not paragraph by paragraph in a browser, no. That is the trade for having no database, no plugins and nothing to be exploited. In practice most owners never used the editor they were given. Changes are sent to me and done within the week, or included if you are on the care plan.
Half before work starts, half on handover. Fixed price agreed in writing first, so the number at the end is the number at the beginning. Not VAT registered, so the price you see is the price you pay.
You see a real page in a browser early, not a flat picture at the end, which is where most of that risk actually lives. Changes during the review window are expected and included. If it is not right after that, we keep going until it is, within the scope that was agreed.
The technical part, yes, and it is included: structure, metadata, structured data, speed, and pages that are actually about what somebody searched for. Not link building or monthly retainers. Those are a different business and mostly a worse one.
Because they are produced by scripts rather than written by hand, and the same scripts are what you would be buying. The audits that measured this site are described on the process page, and every case study states plainly what is unproven about it.