A website quote almost always prices a thing. A number of pages. A template. A content management system, with ticks beside a list of features.
TL;DR. That is not what you are getting, and the distance between the priced thing and the real one is where most of the disappointment lives. You are making two purchases at once. One is a build, which happens and then stops. The other is somebody looking after the result, which does not stop until you say so. A quote that gives a single number has decided not to tell you how it splits, and the split is what determines whether the site still works in two years.
A website is two purchases, not one
The build is a project. It has a start, an end, and something you can point at when it is finished. It costs the same whether you keep the site one year or ten.
Looking after the site is a service. It has no deliverable. Its output is an absence: the certificate that did not expire, the form that did not stop sending, the vulnerability patched the week it was published rather than the month somebody noticed. You are paying for things not to happen, which is difficult to sell and tempting to quietly stop doing.
That asymmetry explains most of what goes wrong here. A build that goes wrong is obvious, because you can see the pages. Looking after a site that goes wrong is invisible by definition, and the first evidence is usually a customer telling you.
Mixing the two serves the seller. A monthly figure with no build fee sounds generous until you notice you are paying for the build every month for as long as you stay, and that now includes ours, which is why the arithmetic is set out below rather than left for you to do. A single up-front figure with no ongoing arrangement sounds cheap until month 7, when something breaks and nobody’s job is to fix it.
So the first question to ask of a quote is not how much. It is which part of this is the build, and which part is the looking after.
What the one-off build fee pays for
The visible part is the pages. It is not the expensive part.
The decisions before anything is drawn. What the site is for, who it addresses, what the first screen has to do, and what to leave out. Five pages saying the right things beat eleven assembled from whatever anyone thought of.
The structure. What lives at which address, and what a search engine is told
about each one. This is invisible to you and it is most of what determines
whether the site is ever found. An address that has been indexed cannot be
rearranged for free: move /services/rewiring to /rewiring without
redirecting the old one and you have not tidied the site, you have discarded
whatever that address had earned and pointed every existing link at nothing.
The build. Layout, typography, behaviour on a phone held in daylight, forms that reach a real inbox, the schema and sitemap that tell Google what it is looking at.
Moving what you already have. An existing site’s content and addresses have to arrive without breaking the links pointing at them. Routinely left off a quote and then charged for, or left off and then done badly.
Launch. Domain pointed, certificate live, forms tested with real submissions, the old site retired without a week of both being up.
We no longer charge for it, and the monthly did not go up to cover it. All of the above still happens and somebody still pays for it; that somebody is now us. The monthly is what it was when a build fee sat on top of it, so the build is absorbed rather than spread, and what secures it is a term rather than a payment, which the section further down sets out. What you pay to begin is nothing: £25, £45 or £65 a month depending on what is being built, a brochure site of up to five pages, one that takes bookings and payments, or one with customer accounts and a staff area behind it. Live in seven days, or the first month is on us. The breakdown is on the pricing page.
What the monthly payment pays for
Hosting is the part everyone names and the cheapest thing on the list. A small site costs very little to serve. If a monthly figure is described to you as hosting, either it is nearly all margin or nearly nothing is being done.
Keeping it up. Uptime monitoring that tells somebody before it tells your customers. Certificate renewals, which fail silently and replace your homepage with a full-page browser warning that a visitor reads as this business has been hacked. The free certificates most small sites run on last 90 days, so renewal is not an annual event somebody remembers. Backups you could restore from, which is a different claim from backups being taken.
Keeping it current. Platform and dependency updates. A site left alone for two years is not standing still: it is accumulating known vulnerabilities. That is the uncomfortable part of how this actually works. Most small business sites run on WordPress, and the ways into an unpatched plugin are published, catalogued and free for anyone to read. That is not a criticism of WordPress: publishing them is how open source gets fixed, and it is also why sites of this size are found by scanners rather than singled out by people. Somebody has to be the one who applies the fix.
Keeping it correct. Content changes when hours, prices or staff change. Broken-link sweeps. Checking the contact form still reaches an inbox, which is the fault that costs the most and announces itself least: nothing bounces, nothing errors, the enquiries stop, and the site looks perfect from the outside. A business can spend a quarter blaming a quiet market.
Keeping it found. Listings claimed and consistent, and a report each month showing how often you appeared, the clicks that produced and your average position. Nobody honest will promise you a position. The work and the measurement are what can be committed to.
Someone to contact. For a business of this size that is the product rather than a courtesy. Ours is £25, £45 or £65 a month in the UK, by Direct Debit, nothing to pay before the site is live, cancellable by email the day you ask, with no exit fee.
What sits outside the price
Worth being exact here, because “outside the price” is where a quote does its hiding.
The domain is not outside ours. Neither are hosting, the certificate, backups, uptime and content changes: there is no invoice for a change of opening hours. We are not VAT-registered, so there is no VAT to add to the figures above.
What the domain is not, since August 2026, is yours from the start. A domain we register is registered to us and transferred to you at the twenty-fourth month; a domain you already brought stays in your name throughout and we only point it at the site. It is included either way and never a line on a bill.
What does sit outside is short, and both of them are somebody else’s invoice rather than a hidden margin on ours. If the site takes card payments, the processor keeps its percentage of each one, in our arrangement and in everybody’s. And photographs you do not already own are yours to commission: we work with what you have, and we will say so when what you have is holding the page back, but a photographer bills a photographer’s fee.
Every quote has its own outside, and it is rarely that short. There is a field guide to the line items in how to read a website quote.
Why the build is folded in, and what that costs you
This section argued the opposite until August 2026, and the arithmetic in it was right. It said the build should be charged once because folding it into the monthly means paying for it every month for as long as you stay, and that a 24-month minimum with no build fee is a build fee with a different name on it. Both of those are still true. What changed is which side of them this business is on, so the honest thing is to leave the reasoning standing and say plainly what it now costs you.
The build is no longer charged, and here is the part that is easy to get wrong: it is not spread into the monthly either. The monthly is the same figure it was when a build fee sat on top of it, so two years now bring in about a third less than they used to. Read the term as the arithmetic it is: the build is given away, and what the twenty-four months secure is not the money back but the site and the address, held until then.
Three things follow, and two of them are worse for you than the old arrangement:
You pay nothing to start, and that is the whole of the gain. No four-figure figure at the point where you have seen a homepage design and nothing else. For most businesses of this size that is the difference between a decision and a maybe, which is the reason this changed.
Leaving early costs you the site and the address rather than money. Cancel in month six and you owe nothing and keep everything you gave us, and the site stays with us, along with the domain if we were the ones who registered it. Under the old arrangement you owned both from the first day. That is a real loss, the address more than the code, and no amount of framing makes it not one. Two ways round it if it matters to you: bring a domain you already own, which stays yours throughout, or buy the build and own everything from day one.
The monthly does not rise, and it did not rise to pay for this. That is the one place this arrangement is better than the category it copies. There is no introductory rate, no step up at month thirteen and no increase at month twenty-five; the figure on the pricing page is the figure for as long as you stay. So the sentence near the top of this article, that a monthly with no build fee means paying for the build every month for as long as you stay, is the one criticism that does not land here, because the monthly never carried the build in the first place.
What has not changed: cancelling is an email, effective the day you send it, with no notice period, no exit fee and no settlement figure. And the one-off build is still sold, priced on a call, for anyone who would rather pay for it and own the site from the first day. If that is you, ask. It is the arrangement this section used to recommend and there was nothing wrong with the reasoning.
A worked example
A dental practice has two quotes for the same site.
The first is £4,200 with nothing monthly, and hosting from £25 in a footnote. The second is £1,500 with £120 a month. Over three years that is £5,100 at best against £5,820, so the first looks like the better arrangement by £720, which is £20 a month.
Now put a single ordinary event through both columns. The practice changes something four times a year: new opening hours over Christmas, a price list, a hygienist arriving, a hygienist leaving. Under the second quote those are included and cost nothing. Under the first, the practice rings a developer who charges £75 an hour with a one-hour minimum, 12 times over three years, which is £900.
£5,100 plus £900 is £6,000. The column that looked £720 cheaper is now £180 dearer, and nothing dramatic happened on the way: no outage, no redesign, no emergency. Somebody changed the opening hours four times.
So the totals never settled it. What settles it is what the £120 buys and what the £25 does not. If the £120 covers content changes, monitoring, updates and somebody who answers, the cheaper column stops being cheaper at the first change. If the £120 buys hosting and a quarterly email, the first quote wins comfortably, and you should take it.
You cannot tell from the totals. You can tell from the split.
Three questions that test any quote
You do not need to know what things ought to cost. You need to know which of the two purchases each line belongs to.
- Which part of this number is the build, and which is the looking after? If it is unclear, ask for it in writing. A supplier who cannot split their own quote has either not thought about it or would rather you did not.
- What happens in month 13? Who is watching, what are they doing, and what does a change cost by then. The first year is the one everybody plans for.
- If I leave, what do I take with me? The domain, the content, the files. If the answer is that the site stops existing, you were renting it, which can be a reasonable arrangement, but it should be one you chose knowingly.
Our own answers are on how it works and pricing, which is the point: the questions are worth asking of us too. If you have a quote in front of you and would like a second opinion on what it does and does not cover, send it over. No charge, and no obligation either way.
