No starting price. No mystery either.
A number without a scope tells you nothing and anchors you to the wrong project. So instead: every variable that moves the cost, and exactly how a quote gets made.
Agencies publish a starting price for one of two reasons. Either it is a genuine floor for a genuinely fixed package, or it is a hook — a number low enough to get a call, after which the real scope arrives and the real number is three times higher.
We do not sell fixed packages, because businesses do not arrive in fixed sizes. And we are not going to publish a hook. What we can do is make the cost model completely legible, so that when a quote lands you can check it against the variables below rather than having to trust it.
The eight variables
Between them these explain almost the whole range of what a business website costs. When two quotes differ wildly, one of these is the reason.
- 01Large impact
Number of templates
Not page count — template count. Twenty pages built from four templates cost far less than eight pages that are each unique. A blog with fifty posts is one template. This is the biggest lever and the one most people get backwards.
- 02Large impact
Who writes the content
The largest cost you directly control. Supplying finished copy is the fastest and cheapest path. Having us draft it means research, interviews, and revision rounds — real work with a real cost attached.
- 03Medium impact
Custom design versus adapting the system
The first project establishes a design system, which is where the design cost sits. Pages built on that system afterwards are much cheaper. Wanting each page visually bespoke means paying for the system repeatedly.
- 04Medium impact
Integrations
Booking, CRM, payments, email marketing, inventory. Each is a separate piece of work with its own testing and failure states. One is routine; four is a project of its own.
- 05Large impact
E-commerce
Catalogue size, product variants, shipping rules, and tax handling all compound. A ten-product store and a thousand-product store are not the same job even if both are a shop.
- 06Medium impact
Migration from an existing site
Auditing existing URLs, deciding what to keep, and building a redirect map. Proportional to how many URLs exist, not to how big the new site is. Skipping it is how redesigns lose search traffic.
- 07Always included
SEO scope
Technical and on-page foundations are part of every build and are not priced separately. Ongoing content production and link acquisition are not services we offer, so they never appear on a quote from us.
- 08Varies impact
Custom functionality
Anything that is not a page: a calculator, a member area, a portal, a dashboard. Priced individually, and the stage where we most often suggest an existing service instead of a build.
How a quote is made
Three steps, and you can stop after any of them at no cost.
- 01
A discovery call
About thirty minutes on what the business does and what the site has to accomplish. No slides, no pitch. If we are not the right fit this is usually where that becomes obvious, and we will say so.
- 02
A written scope
Which templates the site needs, which integrations, who supplies content, and what is explicitly out of scope. This is the document the price is derived from, and you get it before the price.
- 03
A fixed quote and a schedule
One number for the scope as written, with named dates. It does not move unless the scope moves, and anything outside it is quoted separately rather than absorbed silently.
Payment terms are agreed in the contract for each project. We do not publish a deposit schedule here because none is configured as standard — ask on the discovery call and you will get a straight answer.
- Discovery, strategy, and a documented page architecture — included
- Custom design and a documented design system — included
- Responsive implementation verified from 320px upward — included
- Accessibility: semantic markup, keyboard navigation, real focus and error states — included
- Technical and on-page SEO foundations — included
- Core Web Vitals checked against field data before launch — included
- Search Console and analytics set up in your accounts — included
- A handover document, and full ownership of everything — included
- One month of post-launch monitoring and fixes — included
Real costs that are not ours to mark up. You pay each provider directly, at their price, in your own account.
- Domain registration and renewal — bought in your name, paid to your registrar
- Hosting — configured in your account, paid to your provider at their price
- Third-party subscriptions: booking tools, CRMs, email platforms
- Payment-processor transaction fees
- Stock photography and font licences, unless quoted as a line item
- Ongoing changes after the first month, which are quoted as they arise
How to lower the cost
Genuinely, rather than by removing things you will have to add back.
Write the copy yourself. You know the business better than we will after one call, and it is the biggest single variable you control. You get a brief per page saying what each one needs to cover.
Reduce templates, not pages. Ask whether three services really need three differently-shaped pages, or one shape used three times. Usually it is the latter, and it is also better for the visitor.
Launch smaller and add later. Because the site is built on a documented system, adding a service page in month four is cheap. Building all of them up front, before you know which ones matter, is not.
Use an existing service. For booking, payments, or scheduling, integrating something mature almost always beats building your own — including on the parts you have not thought about yet, like refunds and compliance.
More on this in our full write-up on website cost, including how to compare two quotes that look nothing alike.
Pricing questions
Get a real number.
Describe the project and you will get a scope in writing, then a fixed quote. Both before you commit to anything, and both at no cost.