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Insights · Pricing
What a website should cost in Manchester (2026): the honest ledger.
£299 is where a properly built one-page site starts. £15,000 is what some Manchester agencies quote for five pages. Both numbers are real, and the difference is almost never the code. It's what sits around it. Here's the ledger we'd want to see if we were the ones buying.
The four tiers, priced honestly
| Who builds it | Typical range | What you actually get | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder Wix, Squarespace, Shopify themes | £10–40/mo | A template you fill in yourself | Your time, a template look, and the monthly fee never ends |
| Freelancer | £500–£2,500 | A build, quality varies wildly | No contract for what happens after launch: updates, security, downtime are your problem |
| Template agency | £1,500–£5,000 | A purchased theme, restyled | You're paying agency rates for a template plus hourly billing for every change |
| Full agency | £5,000–£15,000+ | Custom design and build | Often the right call for complex builds, but interrogate the line items below before signing |
Ranges are our reading of published UK guides, checked September 2026: Mapletree Studio, October 2025 (custom one-page £400 to £800, multi-page small business £800 to £2,000, bespoke £5,000 and up); Hollis Web, 2026 (customised theme £1,200 to £3,000, custom-coded £5,000 and up); AJ Web Design, April 2026 (freelancers from £297, small agencies £2,500 to £10,000 and up). Quotes vary with scope, so treat the table as bands, not prices.
Our own fixed prices sit deliberately under the agency tiers: £299 all-in for one page, £999 with booking built in, £3,499 for a bespoke Signature build, care included on all three, half paid on order and half when you approve the work. We productised the process rather than billing it hourly. That's a structural choice, not a discount.
The five line items to interrogate
1 · Hosting markup. Hosting a fast static site costs an agency pennies. If you're quoted £30–50/month for "premium hosting," ask what it actually runs on. There are honest answers (managed WordPress with real maintenance is work), but you're entitled to hear one.
2 · "SEO package" add-ons. Titles, descriptions, structured data, a sitemap and fast pages are not an add-on. They're what building a website correctly means. An SEO line item on top of a build quote is often charging twice for the same work. Ongoing SEO (content, authority) is a genuine service; "SEO setup" on a new build usually isn't.
3 · What happens after launch. The most expensive website is the one that quietly rots: broken forms, expired certificates, a hack nobody notices. Ask every provider one question: "who looks at my site in month seven, and what do they check?" If the answer is vague, the real price of the site is unknown.
4 · Who owns it. Domain in whose name? Can you leave with the site? Builder platforms lock you in by design; some agencies do it by contract. Ownership should be yours, in writing.
5 · Hourly billing on changes. "£85/hour for amendments" turns a £3,000 site into a £6,000 relationship. Fixed care pricing exists. Insist on knowing the change process before you sign, not after.
When not to pay us, or any agency
Honesty cuts both ways. If you need a holding page and you enjoy tinkering, Squarespace is fine. If your business lives entirely on Instagram and bookings come through DMs, a website may genuinely be your third priority. And if you've been quoted £15,000 for a five-page brochure site with no bespoke systems behind it, the number isn't wrong because it's big. It's wrong because nothing in the ledger explains it.
A website earns its keep when it has a job: enquiries, bookings, sales, credibility in a procurement process. Price against the job, not the page count.
Asked about pricing
Why are your fixed prices lower than agency rates?
Because they're productised. We build on a system we've refined across our own sites and client builds, so a one-page site is genuinely a known quantity: £299 all-in, with twelve months of care included. Larger, bespoke builds (live 3D, full brand builds, client systems) are scoped individually beyond the packages, like any agency.
What does "care included" actually mean?
Monthly checks on speed, uptime, security and the enquiry path, plus content amendments. Twelve months included with every package, then £15/month, cancel any time. It's the month-seven answer, in writing.
Is a £299 website actually any good?
Judge it by the site you're reading: same studio, same system, same standards: performance-tested, accessible, structured for search and AI engines. One page, done properly, beats five pages done cheaply.
Getting quotes? Send us the ledger you've been given and we'll tell you honestly what's fair, even if the answer is "take it."
Ask us anything