Affordable shouldn’t mean templated.
Custom-built websites for UK businesses on a real budget. £999 to build, £99 a month to run. Real code on real infrastructure — not a Wix site with your logo dropped on top, not a Fiverr corner-cut, not a five-figure agency quote.
One-off, all-in. Brief, design, build, copy assist, deploy and DNS. No "discovery fee", no "design phase", no surprise add-on.
Hosting, monitoring, security, backups and every small content / copy / image change every month. No hourly call-off rate.
Cheaper than the £5,000 SMB agency quote. Better-built than the £200 freelancer. Every line item is on the page; nothing lives in a margin you cannot see.
Brief usAffordable is not the same as cheap.
The UK web design market has a missing middle. Below £500, you get templates, page-builders, Fiverr corner-cuts and "premium WordPress themes" with the brochure shop’s logo dropped on top. Above £5,000, you get account managers, discovery phases, multiple revision rounds and a project-management layer that adds zero to your actual website.
The work itself — a custom-designed, custom-built, properly-hosted website for an SMB — sits in the middle and has done for years. The reason it was historically priced at £5,000 was the people doing it had to run a studio. AI tooling has collapsed the labour cost. A senior operator with Cursor and Claude Code does in one week what a five-person studio used to do in three. £999 + £99 / month is what falls out of that. Same stack and same way of working as Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk.
Where every price point actually sits.
Five honest tiers in the UK SMB web design market. Pick the one that fits the business — we will tell you on the first call if you are on the wrong rung.
A working brochure site with the platform’s branding, a subdomain, capped traffic and no custom domain.
You will pay the platform within months to unlock a domain, SEO, e-commerce or to remove their footer.
Hobby projects, first prototypes, single-event landing pages.
A WordPress theme or page-builder build, often with stock copy. Usually hosted on a shared hosting account in your name.
No-one owns the site at month 3. Patching, security and content edits are paid by the hour, or quietly skipped.
Throwaway sites where the cheapest delivery is genuinely the right call.
A custom-designed Laravel + Tailwind site, deployed on infrastructure we run, with hosting + security + content edits included monthly.
You do have to commit to the monthly retainer for what it covers. You also own the codebase outright and can leave with it any time.
Owner-managed SMBs, scale-ups, professional services firms past the prototype.
A custom-designed site through an account manager, with a discovery phase, mockup rounds, and (usually) a separate annual hosting / care plan.
Most of the additional cost is the studio overhead, not the additional engineering. The output is often the same shape as the £999 tier.
Larger SMBs and mid-market firms where the buyer wants an account-managed relationship as part of the offer.
A bespoke brand and a fully custom site, often as part of a wider brand refresh. Genuinely beautiful work, usually 2-4 months end-to-end.
Most SMBs do not actually need this level. The lift over the £999 tier is in the brand work, not the website itself.
Funded businesses doing a real brand re-launch; companies whose website is the product (e.g. fashion, hospitality flagships).
We genuinely will tell you on the first call if you are on the wrong rung. Most SMBs that come to us asking about a £5,000 agency quote are paying for studio overhead, not website — and most that come asking about a £200 freelancer end up paying it twice when the first build does not survive year one.
The corners we do not cut.
Custom design, not a template
Cheap-tier sites are templates with a logo on top. We design every page against the brand on Tuesday morning. Same Tailwind tooling we use on Homemove and home.co.uk — codified design tokens, not picked from a gallery.
Real code, not page builders
Laravel + Tailwind + Postgres — the same stack we run our own businesses on. No page builder, no proprietary editor runtime slowing every page load, no platform tax baked into your domain.
Hosting that earns its £99
Real uptime monitoring, daily backups with restore tests, dependency and security patching, SSL renewals, a basic WAF. The unsexy work that breaks neglected sites between year one and year three.
Content edits as part of the £99
The retainer covers small copy / image / page-content updates. No hourly call-off rate for "swap a price on the services page" or "add a new partner bio". Email it, we ship it.
No premium-plan upsell
The two numbers on the page are the whole proposition. There is no Business plan, no Commerce plan, no "remove our footer" plan, no transaction cut. We will not move you up a tier ever.
A repo, owned by you
Your site lives in a git repository handed over on day one. Cancel the £99 / month with one month’s notice and walk to anyone else. Affordable should not mean stranded.
Brief on Monday. Live by the end of the week.
Brief
Half-hour call. We will be honest on the call about whether £999 + £99 / month is the right shape for your project. One-page spec back inside 24 hours.
Build
Custom design, custom code, real domain. One senior operator end-to-end — no account manager, no design-by-committee. Staging URL by mid-week.
Run
£99 / month from launch covers hosting, monitoring, security and content edits. Cancel any time, walk away with the code. There is no second-year price hike.
A million ways this could look. None of them templates.
Every site we build is designed to spec, branded for one client. No shared theme between brands. No component kit we recycle. Your site won’t look like anyone else’s because nobody else got your brief.
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Designed to spec. Every page laid out fresh against your brief — not a pre-made template with your logo dropped in. -
Branded to you. Typography, palette, motion language and component shape all chosen for this brand, not a previous client’s. -
Yours forever. Code lives in a git repo that is yours from day one. No platform lock-in, no proprietary CMS, no exit fee.
The honest price questions.
How can you afford to charge only £999 for a custom build?
Because we run lean and we use AI tooling at every step. There is no London lease in the price, no account manager hours, no design-by-committee, no separate copywriter, no project-management layer. Cursor and Claude Code do most of the keyboard work; a senior operator owns the direction, the design taste and the deploy. The work that used to take a five-person studio three weeks lands with one senior operator in one working week.
Why not just hire a £200 freelancer from Fiverr or Upwork?
You can, and we will tell you honestly — for a brochure site that is fine. The risk is everything around the £200 line item: who hosts it, who owns the code, what happens at the first browser update, who fixes the contact form when it breaks, where the source files live in two years. Our £999 is the build, and the £99 / month is the answer to all of those questions. By month six most £200 freelancer sites have either broken or been re-built; ours has not.
What about a free Wix or Squarespace site?
Free Wix / Squarespace lasts until you want a custom domain (paid), real SEO (paid plan), e-commerce (paid plan), to remove their branding (paid plan), or to take payments without a transaction cut (premium plan). Across three years a Business plan plus the usual add-ons typically sits in roughly the same money as our £999 + £99 / month — except theirs has no asset at the end. The page genuinely on us is the right shape if you fit the template; the page on us is for everyone past that.
What is NOT in the £999?
Brand-from-scratch design work (logo design, full brand identity packages, illustrative photography shoots). Multi-language sites. Anything that needs more than ~5-7 pages of unique content. Anything requiring genuinely heavy backend engineering — if you are building a marketplace or a multi-tenant SaaS, talk to us about a separate scope. We will tell you on the first call whether your project fits the £999 + £99 / month shape, and if it does not, what a more honest quote looks like.
Why £999 instead of £499 or £1,499? What is the logic?
Below £999 we cannot honestly cover a full week of senior operator time with margin. Above £1,499 we would be on agency rate cards and we would have to add the things agencies charge for (account managers, multiple revision rounds, project-management overhead). £999 is the threshold where one senior operator can deliver a custom site in a week with margin to look after it for the long tail. It is also a price that does not require board approval at most UK SMBs.
Are there hidden costs I should know about?
No. The two numbers on the page are the two numbers on the invoice. Your domain (£8-£15 / year) is paid to your registrar, not us. Stripe / GoCardless processor fees are paid to them on transactions if you sell on the site. The £999 is the build; the £99 / month is everything else we look after, every month. We will say so on the first call if your scope is one of the rare ones where this number genuinely changes.
Affordable. Not cheap.
Tell us about the business and the budget. If we’re a fit, we’ll come back inside 24 hours with a one-page spec on the £999 + £99/mo shape.
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