What You Actually Get for £79 a Month

A friend of mine reacted recently when I told him what we charge for a proper small business website. Seventy-nine pounds a month. His response was something like, "Really? That much? Just for a website?"

He is a smart guy. He runs a business himself. And he genuinely did not understand what that figure covers or how it compares to the alternative. That is not his fault. Most people have never had to buy a website before, and the industry has done a pretty poor job of explaining where the money actually goes.

So this post is for him, and for anyone else who has had a similar reaction. Here is what you are actually paying for on our Standard plan, and why I think it is one of the best value monthly bills a small business will ever have.

The old way of buying a website#

Before we talk about £79 a month, it helps to look at how most small businesses have historically paid for a website.

The traditional route looks something like this. You find a local web designer or agency. They quote you somewhere between £1,500 and £5,000 upfront, sometimes more. You pay a deposit. They build the site over the next couple of months, usually with several rounds of back and forth where you are not quite sure what you are looking at. Eventually it goes live.

Then you discover the bill is not finished. You still need hosting, which is another fee. You need a domain, which is another fee. You need someone to update the site when your phone number changes or you want to add a new service, and that is either an hourly rate or a retainer. If something breaks, that is a call out. If you want the site redesigned in two years, start again.

So the real cost of a traditional website, over three years, is usually somewhere between £3,000 and £10,000 once you add everything up. And most of that is paid before you know whether the site actually brings you any business.

That is the baseline most people are comparing against, even if they have never quite added it up that way.

What £79 a month actually covers#

Now here is what you get for £79 a month on the Standard plan.

The site itself, built at no upfront cost. No design fee, no development fee, no deposit. We build a proper multi-page website for your business, with real copy, real structure, and a proper brand feel. If you quoted that build on its own from a typical agency, you would not get much change from £2,000.

Hosting on fast, modern infrastructure. Not a cheap shared server. Your site runs on the same kind of infrastructure that powers serious web applications. It loads fast, it stays up, and it handles traffic without wobbling. Decent hosting for a business site on its own is usually £15 to £30 a month.

A domain kept active. We handle the domain setup and keep it pointing at the right place. Small detail, but it is one of the things people forget and then panic about when renewal emails go to an old inbox.

SSL and security. Your site is served over HTTPS, with certificates managed automatically. Security updates are applied without you having to think about them. Most small business sites that get hacked get hacked because nobody updated anything for two years.

SEO foundations that actually work. Meta tags, sitemap, Google indexing, keyword targeting, structured data, a Google Business Profile set up properly. Not the "we ticked an SEO box" version, the version where your site is actually ready to be found for the things your customers are searching for.

Uptime monitoring. If your site goes down at 2am, we know about it before you do. You are not waiting for a customer to email you saying "your website is broken" on a Monday morning.

Ongoing support and content edits. This is the one people underestimate. Phone number changed? New service you want to add? Seasonal hours? A photo swapped out? A paragraph rewritten? That is included. You do not get an invoice every time you need a small change.

Backups and recovery. If anything goes wrong, we can roll back. You do not lose your site because of a bad update or a server issue.

An analytics dashboard. Traffic, where it came from, what pages people looked at. Clear, readable, yours to check whenever you want - not a 40-page report dropped once a month.

A real person on the other end. This is the part that is hardest to put a price on. When you need something, you are not filing a ticket with an offshore support queue. You are talking to the person who actually built your site.

Add that lot up honestly, and the monthly cost of running a proper small business website with a traditional setup is usually well north of £79, even before you factor in the build cost being absorbed into the subscription.

The thing people miss about a no-upfront build#

The reason this works is that the build is not actually free in the sense of "no cost to us." It costs us real time and real effort to design and build a site. What we are doing is moving that cost out of an upfront lump sum and into the ongoing relationship.

That is better for both sides.

For you, it means you are not writing a cheque for two grand to find out whether a website is going to work for your business. You get the site, you see it live, and you only keep paying if it is earning its place.

For us, it means we only make money if we actually keep you happy. If the site is a lemon, or if we stop answering emails, you cancel. No lock in, no contract, no minimum term. We have to earn the next month every single month.

That is a very different incentive structure from "take the money upfront and hope you do not call us back."

What it compares to in your actual life#

Seventy-nine pounds a month is less than a lot of things a small business already pays for without blinking.

• A business mobile phone contract is usually around £30 to £60 a month, and it does not bring you customers.
• Van insurance for a tradesperson can easily be £100 a month or more.
• A decent accountant is £100 to £200 a month and up.
• A single Google Ads campaign with any ambition is several hundred a month.
• A basic CRM subscription is £40 a month for nothing but an address book.

Against that backdrop, £79 a month for the thing that is meant to turn strangers into customers is not expensive. It is one of the cheaper serious line items on the books.

What one customer is worth#

This is the part my friend had not thought about, and I think it is the most important one.

Ask yourself what a single new customer is worth to your business over a year. For a tradesperson doing bathrooms, that is a few thousand pounds. For a local restaurant, it is probably a few hundred over the course of repeat visits. For a consultant, it could be tens of thousands. For an e-commerce business, it depends on the product, but you can do the maths.

Now ask how many extra customers the website needs to bring in to pay for itself.

At £79 a month, the site costs just under a thousand pounds a year. If it brings you one extra customer, for almost any serious business, it has paid for itself many times over. Everything after that is profit.

Compare that to the traditional model, where you pay two or three thousand pounds upfront before the site has generated a single enquiry, and you are often hoping for four or five new customers just to break even in year one.

The monthly model is not the expensive option. It is the lower risk one.

What you are not paying for#

It is also worth being clear about what is not included, because I do not want anyone signing up expecting something different.

This is not a bespoke agency retainer where we do your marketing, write ongoing blog posts, run your social media, design print collateral, or build you a full e-commerce platform. If you need e-commerce, bookings, or a custom application, that is what our Studio plan is for, priced per project.

What £79 a month gets you is a proper, professional multi-page website, set up to be found on Google, kept alive and looked after by a real person, with no upfront cost and no contract.

For most small businesses, that is exactly what they need. They do not need a fifty-page site with a blog nobody reads. They need a homepage, a few service pages, an about page and a contact page, all written clearly, loading fast, and looking professional enough that a potential customer takes them seriously.

If you are a sole trader who only needs a single conversion page, our Starter plan is one bespoke landing page at £25 a month. Same team, same stack, a deliberately narrower product shape.

The bottom line#

When my friend said £79 a month sounded like a lot, what he was really comparing it to was nothing. Not a traditional agency bill. Not the hosting and maintenance costs of a DIY site. Not the value of a single customer. Just a vague sense that a website should be cheaper than that.

Once you actually line it up against what the alternatives cost, and against what even one new customer is worth, the maths goes the other way quickly.

It is not the cheapest monthly bill a business will pay. It is one of the best value ones.

If you have been putting off getting a website because of the upfront cost, or because you are not sure it will pay off, this is what the alternative looks like. No deposit, no contract, and a real person on the other end of it.

That is the whole pitch.

If Standard is more than you need, or you want something built to spec, here is the full rundown of all three plans and how to figure out which one fits. And if you are still wondering whether a website is even worth it in a world where people are asking ChatGPT for recommendations, we wrote about that too.