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What it costs

Agencies and developers seldom publish their prices, which leaves you with no idea whether a quote is reasonable because you've got nothing to compare it to. So, here are the ballpark figures you'll pay when you come to us: upfront costs, ad hoc running costs (if any), and the one thing that recurs: hosting. Every figure on this page excludes VAT.

What it costs to make a new website

Building a website

From
£750
A brochure site of about five pages, roughly fifteen hours
From
£2,500
An online shop on a standard platform, around fifty hours
Range
£5,000 to £7,500
A shop built around your business, a hundred to a hundred and fifty hours

A straightforward brochure site of about five pages starts at around £750, which is roughly fifteen hours of work. That covers the design, the build, the writing where it is needed and a round or two of revisions once you have seen it.

An online shop on a standard platform is about £2,500, or around fifty hours. The jump is mostly in the parts customers never see: products and categories set up properly, delivery rules that match what your courier actually charges, payment and tax configured and tested, and the housekeeping that stops an order going astray.

A shop built around how your business actually works runs from £5,000 to £7,500, which is somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty hours. This is the band for a site that has to fit the business rather than the other way round, whether that means synchronising with your stock management system, handling trade and retail customers differently, or automating a job somebody currently does by hand every morning.

What moves a project towards the top of its band is usually one of four things: specialist development and programming, buying premium extensions, commissioning photography or artwork, or building something that does not exist yet. We will tell you which of those applies to you before you commit, not once the work is under way. For more ambitious businesses, we generally recommend a phased approach – get the site running and generating income sooner rather than later, then invest in the next phase to make it even more profitable.

Video

A screencast is the cheapest video you can commission. Most need very little preparation and can be recorded, edited and published inside an hour, so one costs about what an hour of our time costs.

An animated explainer is a larger job, carrying a minimum of ten to fifteen hours even when the finished film is short, so they start at around £500. Anything longer or more involved is quoted before it starts, in the same way as a build.

Filming on site is quoted per job, because it depends on how much there is to film and how far there is to travel.

What you pay once it is live

Ongoing work is charged at £54 an hour plus VAT, with some jobs, like simple data entry, done by someone junior at a lower rate. You pay for the time each job takes, with no minimum, no contract and no monthly fee, and invoices arrive monthly or quarterly in arrears with a timesheet listing every job and how long it took. A quiet month costs you nothing at all. We will work on a retainer if you would rather budget that way.

Work you have not asked for

Some of the most valuable work on a website is the work nobody thinks to request. A page that is nearly ranking gets rewritten so that it does, a competitor who has started to overtake you gets looked at properly, a link worth having gets chased, and a technical fault gets dealt with while it is still small enough to be cheap. A fair amount of it is simply talking to a supplier, a host or a payment provider on your behalf, so that you do not have to.

None of that turns up as a surprise on an invoice, because you decide in advance how much of it you want. Most clients agree a rough monthly ceiling for work of this kind, which lets us get on with it instead of stopping to ask each time, and tells us where to stop. Others would rather approve each piece before it happens, which is slower but works perfectly well. Either way it is still time actually worked, charged at the same rate, so a month with nothing worth doing costs you nothing.

A ceiling is not a retainer and not a monthly fee. It is a limit rather than a commitment, and if we do not reach it, you do not pay it.

Hosting

Hosting is the only charge that recurs. Our business hosting package suits most small businesses and is £12.92 a month plus VAT, invoiced quarterly. It includes daily and weekly backups kept off site, Imunify360 to deal with the attacks every website now attracts, and for WordPress sites a free WP Rocket licence to keep pages loading quickly.

Your domain names and any licences stay in your own name and on your own card rather than ours. That is the one piece of advice on this page we would give you even if you never became a client, because we have met too many businesses locked out of their own domain by a supplier who stopped answering.

Payment terms

Builds are quoted as a fixed price once we know what is involved, so the figure you agree is the figure you pay. New clients are asked for a 25% deposit before work starts, with the balance due on completion. Longer projects are usually invoiced in stages against agreed points in the work, which spreads the cost and means you are never far ahead of what has actually been done.

What you own

You own all of it: the design, the code, the content and the data, from the moment the bills are paid. The domain has been yours throughout. If you decide to go elsewhere, everything comes with you and there is nothing to unpick, because there is no contract to end and nothing of yours is held anywhere you cannot reach it.

How long it takes, and what we need from you

A five page brochure site typically takes about a month, including revisions. A major ecommerce rebuild takes three to four months, of which a good few weeks go on planning and design before a line of code is written.

Those timings assume the material is ready. What holds a project up is almost never the building, it is waiting on the things only you can supply: your logo and any brand materials, photographs of your products or premises, and the words for each page. If the words are the part standing in the way, let us know and we will write them, which usually means interviewing you and turning your inside knowledge into copy. It is worth having those three things settled before we start, because a project that pauses for a fortnight rarely picks up exactly where it left off.

If this is more than you had in mind

If your budget is a long way below the bottom band, a build-your-own website platform is the sensible answer. Those platforms have their place. And if you outgrow it, or you find that running it is taking more of your week than the business can spare, we will still be here.

Tell us what you are trying to do

The quickest way to a real number is a conversation about what the site has to do for the business. Phone, email or WhatsApp, whichever suits, and there is no charge for asking.

0118 950 7617[email protected]