Web design pricing, and exactly what you get for it

The three prices

$500 — one-page site. $900 — five-page site. $1,800 — online store.

That is a one-time fee. There is no monthly retainer, no licence, and no lock-in. When the site is finished it belongs to you: the files, the design, the content and the domain. Hosting and the domain are billed to you at cost, with nothing added.

Two rounds of revisions are included in every tier. Sites are typically live about two weeks after we have your content.

$500 — one-page site

Best for a trade, a contractor, a single-location service business, or anyone whose work comes in over the phone.

Included: one page built as a sequence of sections (typically hero, services, about, gallery, service area, contact); designed for phones first, then checked on tablet and desktop; tap-to-call phone number and a contact form that sends to your email; map embed, address and opening hours; a written list of the towns you actually serve; up to ten of your photographs, resized and compressed so the page loads fast; your logo placed properly, or a clean text treatment of your business name if you have no logo; on-page SEO basics — page title, meta description, heading structure, image alt text and a sitemap; SSL and https; Search Console and a basic analytics setup, both in accounts you own; we will point your existing Google Business Profile at the new site; layout and light tidying of the words you supply; deployment, DNS setup and handover of every login; two rounds of revisions.

Not included: additional pages — if you need more than one, that is the $900 tier; writing your copy from a blank page, since we will tidy what you give us but will not invent your business for you; logo design or brand identity work; photography; a blog or any content management system; online payments, booking calendars or customer logins; ongoing SEO work, paid advertising or social media; monthly maintenance or content updates after handover; email newsletter setup, live chat, or third-party integrations beyond the contact form.

$900 — five-page site

Best for a business with several distinct services, a practice, a restaurant with more to say than a menu, or anyone who needs to look established.

Included: everything in the one-page tier; five pages, typically Home, Services, About, Service Area and Contact, and if your business needs a different five we agree them before we start; individual page titles, meta descriptions and headings for each page so each page can rank for its own thing; a proper navigation menu and sensible internal linking; a gallery of up to 30 photographs across the site; an FAQ section written from questions you actually get asked; a testimonials section if you supply real ones from real customers, which we will not write and will not invent; a structured service-area page listing the towns or boroughs you genuinely cover; two rounds of revisions across the whole site, not per page.

Not included: any e-commerce, cart or checkout, which is the $1,800 tier; a blog or CMS — if you want to write posts yourself, tell us before we start, because it changes how the site is built and it is quoted separately; customer accounts, member areas or password-protected pages; booking or scheduling systems, though we can link out to a booking tool you already pay for; copywriting from scratch, logo design, photography, ongoing SEO or advertising; multi-language versions.

$1,800 — online store

Best for retail with real stock, makers, and food or drink producers selling direct.

Included: everything in the five-page tier, so the shop sits inside a proper website rather than floating on its own; store setup on a hosted e-commerce platform, in an account registered in your name; up to 25 products loaded from a spreadsheet you supply, with categories and product photographs optimised; cart, checkout and order confirmation emails, tested end to end with a live test order; shipping rates configured — flat rate, weight-based, free-over-threshold, or local pickup; sales tax settings configured for the states you sell into, based on what you tell us; payment provider connected to your own account so the money goes straight to your bank; policy pages for shipping, returns and privacy, laid out from the text you provide; a short written handover on adding products yourself after launch.

Not included: the platform's own monthly fee and the payment processor's per-transaction percentage, which are theirs and not ours and are unavoidable on any store; product photography; writing 25 product descriptions from nothing; loading more than 25 products at launch, which we quote by the batch; inventory sync with a till or point-of-sale system; subscriptions, memberships, wholesale price tiers or trade accounts; marketplace connections such as Amazon, eBay or Etsy; abandoned-cart flows, loyalty schemes or email marketing automation; VAT, customs or international tax handling.

What hosting and a domain actually cost

This is where most people get quietly overcharged, so here are the real numbers.

A .com domain costs roughly $15 to $25 a year at a normal registrar. Some other endings cost more, a few cost less. That is the whole cost of a domain.

Hosting for a small static site — which is what the $500 and $900 tiers produce — costs between nothing and about $5 a month. Fast, reliable static hosting genuinely is free at the small end. We will tell you when it is, rather than inventing a hosting bill.

A store is different. A hosted e-commerce platform charges a monthly fee, and the payment processor takes a percentage of each sale plus a fixed few cents. Those are real costs and nobody can build them away. We will show you the current rates before you commit.

Business email is separate again. A proper mailbox on your own domain typically costs a few dollars per user per month from the usual providers.

We bill all of this at cost. There is no markup and no management fee. Wherever the provider allows it, the accounts are opened in your name on your card, so you are never in a position where your site depends on us paying a bill. You hold the registrar login, the hosting login, the analytics and the store admin. If you want to move to another designer, you take everything and go.

What a revision is, and what counts as a new job

Two rounds of revisions are included in every tier. A round means one consolidated list of changes from you. Send it in one go rather than in twelve separate emails and you get much more out of it.

A revision covers: changing wording, swapping or replacing images, adjusting colours and fonts within the agreed design, moving sections around on a page, fixing anything we got wrong, and correcting anything broken.

A new job — quoted separately, in writing, before any work starts — covers: adding pages beyond the tier you bought, changing the agreed page structure after you have signed it off, starting the design again in a different direction because you have changed your mind about the look, adding a shop to a site that was not built as one, adding a booking system or CMS, and any new content written from scratch.

We are not precious about the line. A handful of extra tweaks after round two will not generate an invoice. Rebuilding the home page for the third time will.

What happens after launch

The site goes live, we hand over every login, and we send you a short written note covering where everything lives and how to change your hours and text.

If something we built breaks — a form stops sending, a link dies, a layout fault turns up on a phone we did not test — we typically fix it at no charge. That is our error, not a change request.

There is no monthly plan to opt out of, because there is no monthly plan. If you want changes later, ask, and we will quote the job before doing it. Some clients come back twice a year, some never come back, and both are fine.

Payment and timing

We typically take a deposit to book the build slot, with the balance due at launch. On the store tier we will usually split it into three. The exact terms go in writing before anything starts, so nothing on the invoice is a surprise.

Hosting and domain costs are typically set up on your own account and card at the outset. Where that is not practical, they are passed through at cost on the invoice with the provider's receipt attached.

The two-week timeline runs from the day your content lands with us, not from the day you pay. The clock is content, not code. The single biggest cause of a slow build is waiting three weeks for photographs.