28 July 2026 · 6 min read
A £5,000 quote is not five grand of design. It is design, plus account management, plus a discovery workshop, plus project management, plus the agency's overheads. For a six page site selling a local service, most of that spend never reaches the thing your customers actually see.
Where the money goes in an agency quote
- Discovery and workshops: often two weeks and a healthy slice of the fee.
- Account management: a person whose job is to relay messages between you and the designer.
- Internal review rounds: billed time spent showing the work to other people at the agency.
- Overheads: offices, sales, and the retainer clients who get priority over you.
None of that is fraud. It is simply how a larger team has to operate, and it is why the same six page brochure site costs ten times more there than it does with a small studio.
What a focused £500 build actually covers
Our own build is deliberately scoped: a homepage designed around enquiries, service pages, an about page, a contact page with a working form, local SEO basics, tracking, and a launch. You speak to the person designing it. There is no account manager, because there is nobody to manage.
The £50 a month afterwards covers hosting, updates, backups, security, small content edits and support, which is the part most one off cheap builds quietly leave you to sort out yourself.
Cheap and inexpensive are different things
A £500 site is not a £500 template with your logo dropped on it. The saving comes from scope and structure, not from cutting corners: no bespoke booking engine, no custom illustration set, no six week discovery phase. The design, the copy direction, the speed and the SEO groundwork are the same standard you would expect from a good agency build.
When you genuinely should spend more
- You are selling products online with hundreds of lines and real stock logistics.
- You need custom software: membership areas, booking systems tied to your diary, client portals.
- You are a multi site brand needing a design system several teams will use.
- Your website is the product, not the shop window.
If none of those describe you, the extra £4,500 buys process, not performance. Spend a slice of it on photography and Google Ads instead and you will see the difference far sooner.
See exactly what is included on our pricing page, or read what maintenance should cover.