Pricing
What things cost, before you have to ask
Getting a straight answer on price is the hardest part of hiring anyone for this work. Quotes for the same job come back three and four times apart, and asking why usually gets you "how long is a piece of string". Here are honest starting points, and the things that move them.
Guide prices
Where I start
Every quote is prepared individually — these are starting points, not a menu. What you actually get is one page with a single fixed number on it, before any work begins.
Brochure website
from £1,950
Five to eight pages, written, built and launched. Three to six weeks.
Online shop
from £4,500
Shopify or WooCommerce, whichever suits the products. Six to ten weeks.
Diagnostic audit
£450
One-off. What's wrong, what it's costing you, what to do first.
Search (SEO)
from £750 / month
Three months, then month to month. Thirty days' notice.
Ad management
from £600 / month
A flat fee, never a percentage of your spend. Ad budget is separate and paid direct.
Hosting & care
£45 / month
£95 for shops. Renews at the same price — see below.
All figures exclude VAT. The renewal price is the price. No introductory rate that quietly triples in year two, and if a monthly fee ever has to change you get three months' notice and a reason.
The other service line
Cybersecurity & compliance is priced separately
Everything above is for owner-managed businesses. Regulatory cybersecurity work — CAF, NIS and NIS2, CIS Controls, OT security analysis — is a different discipline sold to a different buyer, so it carries its own numbers rather than being averaged into these.
Same principle though: published, fixed where it sensibly can be, and a day rate where fixing the price would just mean padding it.
Compliance work
CAF readiness & gap assessment
from £4,500
CIS Controls gap analysis & roadmap
from £3,500
Embedded programme analysis
from £595 / day
Excludes VAT. Inside or outside IR35 — tell me the determination and I'll work to it.
Context
What everyone else charges
A guide price is meaningless on its own. Here is the published 2026 UK market, so you can see where I sit in it — including the places where somebody else is the better buy.
Service
UK freelancer
West Midlands agency
STRJ
Brochure website
£800 – £3,000
£4,500 – £9,000
from £1,950
Online shop
£1,500 – £3,500
(Shopify starter)
£12,000+
from £4,500
Search, monthly
£300 – £2,500
£1,500 – £20,000
from £750
Ad management, monthly
£300 – £1,200
£500 – £1,500
from £600
Hosting & care, monthly
£20 – £90
£75 – £200
£45
Ranges compiled from published UK agency and freelancer pricing guides, 2026. London sits roughly 30–45% above regional rates for the same specification, which is worth knowing if you are comparing quotes from further south.
Reading the table honestly
Where I'm not the answer
If the cheapest number on that table is what matters, it isn't me, and I'd rather say so on this page than on a call after you've spent an hour of your day.
- Under £800 for a website. That exists, and for a genuine three-page online business card it can be the right call. What you generally won't get at that price is anyone thinking about what the page needs to say to make somebody ring you.
- Under £500 a month on search. Below that you are buying automated output rather than someone's attention. It is not that cheap SEO is a scam — it is that there are not enough hours in the fee to do the work.
- Very small ad budgets. If you are spending £400 a month on ads, a £600 management fee makes no sense. Run it yourself, and I will show you how on the free call.
And where I am
The gap in the middle
The table has a hole in it, and that hole is the whole business. There is cheap work where nobody senior is thinking about your commercial problem, and there is agency work at three to five times the price where a senior person sells it and a junior delivers it.
A West Midlands agency will quote £4,500 to £9,000 for the brochure site I would charge under £2,000 for. That difference is not craftsmanship — it is offices, account managers, sales commission and the people between you and whoever is actually typing.
You are paying for a senior person to do the work rather than attend the meeting about it. That is the entire pitch.
What moves the number
- How much there is. Six pages or sixty. Forty products or four thousand.
- What it has to connect to. Bookings, payments, stock, your accounts package. Integrations are the single biggest driver and the thing most quotes stay vague about.
- Whether words and pictures exist. Good photos and a clear idea of what you want to say is real money saved. Copywriting alone adds £500–£2,000 at most agencies; mine is included.
- Whether we're moving something. A migration means protecting rankings and mapping every old address to a new one.
- How competitive your search terms are. "Plumber in Aldridge" and "personal injury solicitor" are not the same job.
Always included, never an extra
- The copy, written for you
- Accessibility built in, not bolted on
- Speed, measured and reported
- Search fundamentals and structured markup
- Analytics and conversion tracking, tested
- Everything registered in your name
- Training so you can make small changes yourself
Costs extra, and I'll say so up front
- Photography and video
- Logo and full brand design
- Third-party licences and subscriptions
- Your advertising spend, paid direct to Google or Meta
- Substantial new sections added after scope is agreed
The sum worth doing
Work out the break-even before you spend anything
Take what an average job is worth to you after costs, and divide the monthly fee by it. That is how many extra jobs a month the spend has to produce simply to stand still.
At £750 a month, a builder clearing £2,000 on a bathroom needs roughly one extra job every two and a half months. That is a straightforward decision. A takeaway clearing £4 an order needs about 190 extra orders a month, which is a very different conversation.
We will do this sum together on the first call, with your numbers. If it does not work, I will tell you it does not work.
How paying works
- Projects — fixed price, half up front, half on going live
- Monthly work — three months, then month to month
- Notice — thirty days, and no exit fee, ever
- Changes — priced and agreed before I do them
- If you leave — you take the domain, the site, the hosting and the analytics history
Three months on retained work is the minimum useful period for search, not a lock-in. It is short enough that you are really only committing to giving me a fair trial.
Cheaper options, honestly
If the budget is tight, these are real alternatives and I would rather point you at them than take money you cannot spare.
- Squarespace, around £200 a year. For a simple site you maintain yourself. Genuinely good, and live this weekend.
- Shopify with a premium theme, from about £29 a month plus £150 for the theme. If you are starting to sell and have not proven demand yet, do this before you pay anyone thousands.
- Your Google Business Profile. Free, and for a local trade it frequently moves more than the website does.
- A good local freelancer at £800–£1,500. There are plenty in the West Midlands. Ask to see three sites they have built for businesses like yours, and ask who owns the domain afterwards.
Get a real number for your job
Guide prices only get you so far. Half an hour on the phone, free, and I will follow up with a fixed written price — or tell you that you do not need to spend anything yet.
