Most small businesses pay £99.99 a month for a website. Here is what that buys.
That is Starter Plus, the plan most people take. Your website built for you by our experts, your domain, the hosting, business email, online booking and someone to ring when you need a change. Plans start at £59.99 if all you want is the website. No build fee either way, and nothing to pay until it goes live.
What each plan costs
Every price includes VAT. Pay monthly, or pay for the year and save 10%. Most people take Starter Plus, because it is the one with the customer hub on it.
Starter
£59.99
a month, inc VAT
or £647.88 for the year
Starter Plus
£99.99
a month, inc VAT
or £1,079.88 for the year
Growth
£199.99
a month, inc VAT
or £2,159.88 for the year
What the monthly price covers
Bought separately, most of these are a bill from a different company. Here they are one line on one invoice.
- The website, built for you by our experts
- Your domain name, registered and paid for
- Hosting and the security certificate
- Business email on your own domain
- Changes when your business changes
- Backups, updates and security
All of it on one bill, and nothing to pay until the site is live.
See your new website nowThree ways to buy a website, and how each one bills you
Prices vary so much that a range would be no use to you. What does not vary is the shape of the bill, and that is usually what catches people out.
Build it yourself
A website builder charges a small monthly fee and you build the thing yourself. You spend the evenings as well as the fee, and you spend them again every time something needs changing.
Pay somebody to build it once
A freelancer or an agency quotes for the build and you pay most of it up front. Hosting, the domain and email are then yours to sort out, and changes are quoted one at a time after that.
Pay monthly for the lot
What we do. The build, the domain, the hosting, the email and the changes are one monthly price, so there is nothing to find up front and nothing to arrange yourself.
Weighing up a builder? My Webby and Wix, My Webby and Squarespace or My Webby and GoDaddy.
Why website prices are all over the place
Ask five people what a website costs and you will get five answers somewhere between nothing and twenty thousand pounds. That is why every page you have read so far told you it depends. It does depend, but not on anything mysterious. It depends on how much of the work you do yourself.
At one end you do all of it. A builder subscription costs a few pounds a month and you spend the evenings picking a template, writing every page, finding photos, checking it on a phone and filling in the settings. At the other end somebody does all of it for you and you pay for their hours. A designer, a writer and a developer all charge for their time, and that is why an agency quote runs into the thousands.
Everything in between is a different split of the same work. So the fair way to compare two prices is to ask what each one leaves on your plate, then decide what your evenings are worth. That is what this page is for.
What you are actually paying for
A website is not one thing you buy. It is about eight things, and most quotes only price some of them. It is worth seeing them separately, because the gap between two quotes is usually a gap in this list rather than a gap in quality.
There is the design, which is how it looks and how the pages are laid out. The writing, which is every heading and paragraph on every page, and takes longer than the design. The photos, finding them, cropping them, getting them to load fast. And the build itself, turning all of that into working pages.
Then the parts that keep it alive. Your domain name, renewed every year. Hosting, the space the site lives in. The security certificate, which is why the padlock shows. Business email on your own domain. Backups, updates and security, which nobody thinks about until the week they matter.
And the part almost no quote includes: changes. A website is not finished when it goes live. Your hours change, you add a service, a price moves. Somebody has to do that, and it is either you on a Sunday or somebody you pay.
Our monthly price covers all of it. One bill, one company to ring, nothing to arrange yourself.
The quickest way to know what yours would cost
Answer a few questions and two designs come back with a price on them. Free to look at, and nothing to pay until the site is live.
One payment or every month
People compare a monthly figure against a one off quote and decide the one off is cheaper. Sometimes it is. What gets missed is that a one off quote covers the build and stops there.
After a one off build you still need hosting, and that is a bill from somebody. You still need the domain renewed. You still need email. And when you want a change in March, that gets quoted and invoiced on its own, which is why small changes often never get made. Nobody wants to raise a job for a phone number.
A monthly price rolls all of that into one line. The trade off is that you are renting rather than buying. While the subscription runs the site is live and looked after by us. When it ends, the site comes down. Your domain is yours to take after twelve months, and your words and photos were always yours.
Which is better depends on how you like to pay for things. A one off build suits somebody with the money up front who is happy arranging the rest. Monthly suits somebody who would rather have one predictable bill and nobody to chase.
The bit that never appears in a quote
This is the one we can speak on with some authority, because it is our trade. The number that never gets written down is the hours.
A five page website, built properly on a builder by somebody who has not done it before, is not a weekend. Choosing the template goes quickly. Then there is a page to write for each kind of work you want, three or four hundred words each if the page is going to do anything. Photos to find, crop and compress. The phone layout, which is a second pass over everything. Page titles, descriptions, the sitemap, the form settings, the redirect from whatever was there before.
Most people we speak to have started one and stopped. Not because it was too hard, but because it sat in the same queue as quoting, invoicing and actually doing the work, and it never won. There is no judgement in that. It is what happens to a job with no deadline.
So when you put a builder subscription next to our monthly price, the gap between the two is what you are paying somebody else to spend their evenings on instead of yours.
Why there is a twelve month minimum
Every plan runs for at least twelve months. We would rather explain that than bury it.
The build is the expensive part and it happens at the start. An expert spends real hours on your site before you have paid anything, because nothing comes out until it is live. The twelve months is how that works as a business. Without it we would need a build fee up front, which is exactly the thing we are trying to take off your plate.
What you get for committing to the year is a website built by somebody who does this for a living, with no money down, and a fixed price for the whole term. Your price is the price you signed up on. If we put our prices up later, that is for new customers, not you.
After twelve months you can cancel whenever you like, and the domain is yours to take with you.
Have a look before you spend anything
Two designs for your business in about five minutes, and an expert to talk it through with afterwards.
What is not in the price
A page about cost that only lists what is included is half a page. Here is the other half.
There is no setup fee, no build fee and nothing to pay until the site is live. What does cost more are the things you choose to add, and they are all priced on the pricing page rather than quoted in a meeting. Extra service pages beyond the ones your plan includes. Extra mailboxes. The local search pack on the plans that do not already have it.
Changes work differently by plan. On Starter Plus and Growth a set number each month are included. On Starter, changes are quoted, and small ones are small. Either way you are told the number before anything starts.
And if what you need is genuinely bigger than a plan, an online shop, a booking system with staff and rooms, a site with dozens of pages, that is a bespoke build and it starts with a conversation. We would rather tell you that on day one than sell you a plan that does not fit.
Why our prices include VAT
Most website prices you see are quoted before VAT, so the number you remember is not the number that leaves your account. We show ours the other way round, which makes us look dearer next to a price list that does not.
The reason is that a lot of the people we build for are sole traders and small limited companies who are not VAT registered, so for them the VAT is just part of the cost and pretending otherwise is no help. If you are VAT registered you claim it back as normal, and your invoice shows the split.
When you compare us against anybody else, check which way round their prices are quoted before you compare the two numbers.
Common questions about cost
Is it a one off price or a monthly one?
Monthly. The website, the domain, the hosting, the business email and the support all come as one bill, and there is no separate build fee at the start. A one off build is the other way of buying a website: a few thousand up front, then hosting and every change billed on top.
When does the first payment come out?
When your website goes live, not before. You can answer the questions, see the designs and go through them with your expert without paying anything.
Are there setup fees or hidden extras?
No setup fee. The domain, the security certificate, the hosting and the mailboxes are all in the monthly price. The only things that cost more are the ones you choose to add, and they are priced on the pricing page.
What is the minimum I would spend?
Twelve months on the plan you pick, because that is the minimum term. Starter paid yearly is the lowest we go.
Does the price go up later?
Your price is the price you signed up on. If we put our prices up, that is for new customers.
Can I cancel, and what happens to the website?
After twelve months you can cancel whenever you like and the domain is yours to take with you. The website itself is hosted and looked after by us, so it comes down when the subscription ends.
Let Webby take it off your hands
Answer a few questions and Webby designs it in front of you. No card required to look, and nothing to pay until your site goes live.