Why the price is hidden in the first place
There is a genuine reason and a less genuine one, and it is worth being able to tell them apart.
The genuine reason is that a website is not one product. A five-page brochure site and a sixty-page site with a shop and a booking system are not the same job, and quoting one number for both would be dishonest in the other direction.
The less genuine reason is that a hidden price lets the number move. If you turn up in a van, you get one figure. If you turn up with a marketing director and a brand guidelines document, you get another. Same build.
The fix is not to pretend every site costs the same. It is to publish what drives the number, so you can work out roughly where you land before anyone gets you on a call.
The one thing that actually drives the price: page count
Almost every quote comes down to how many pages have to be written, designed, built and checked. Not the design. Not the platform. Pages.
A page is not a template with the town name swapped. It is a real page with its own heading structure, its own copy, its own internal links and its own reason to exist. That takes time, and time is the cost.
Quick sense check: count the pages on your current site. Then count the services you offer and the towns you cover. If the second number is much bigger than the first, that gap is the reason you are not being found.
What each tier really includes
Here is ours, in full, with the honest caveats attached.
The top of that table is not the top of the range. Those four are standard sites of up to about fifteen pages. An online shop, a quote builder, a booking system, anything that talks to your CRM or stock system, or a rebuild running to sixty or a hundred pages — those are custom projects and they start around £2,500. Most of the work we are proudest of sits above the table, not in it.
Above about fifteen pages the tiers stop applying and it becomes a page-count job. An established firm with sixty to a hundred pages is roughly £70–95 a page beyond the first fifteen, so a hundred-page rebuild lands near £8,000. That is not a bigger margin. It is a hundred pages.
The costs that turn up afterwards
This is where quotes diverge most, and where the cheap ones stop being cheap.
- Hosting and care — ours is £200 a year, which covers hosting, daily backups, security and changes made the same day over WhatsApp.
- An editable back end — included from Complete upwards. If a quote does not mention a login, assume there is not one.
- Content — if the site needs a new page every month to keep growing, someone has to write it. £100 a month for Get seen, £250 for Growth.
- Ad spend — separate from management, and it should never be marked up. Ask directly whether it is.
Five questions worth asking any agency
- How many pages is that? If they cannot answer, the quote is not a quote.
- Do I get a login? Ask before you sign, not after launch.
- Who actually writes the content? “You send us the copy” is a large hidden cost dressed as a small one.
- What happens in month thirteen? Some builds are cheap because the renewal is not.
- Do you mark up ad spend? A straight no is the only good answer.
What we would actually tell you to do
If you are weighing up £1,000 against £1,500 and unsure, the honest advice is to spend £100 first. See a real homepage built on your own words and your own photographs before committing to anything, and take the £100 off the build if you go ahead. If you hate it, you have lost £100 rather than four figures and three months.
Spend £100 and see a real homepage built on your own words and photographs before you commit to anything. Refunded in full if you go ahead.
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