Why I work this way
Most agency pricing is a hangover. A large build fee made sense when building a website was genuinely months of work. A management fee made sense when coordinating four specialists was a job in itself. Neither is as true as it was, and clients can feel it — they just cannot always point at what has changed.
What has changed is that the tooling got dramatically faster and the landscape got dramatically less stable. The work is no longer “build the thing, then maintain the thing”. It is a constant series of small, well-chosen interventions: a page Google has started favouring, an image format that halves your load time, a checkout step people keep abandoning, a product feed that has quietly begun rejecting a category.
You cannot scope that a year in advance, which is exactly why I stopped trying. Buy a block of hours. I will tell you honestly where they are best spent this month, and you will get a plain summary of what happened. It works out roughly like outsourcing your marketing department — the capability without the salary or the recruitment. The continuity comes from how the work is done rather than from headcount: everything is in your name, built on standard platforms and documented, so it can be picked up by somebody else if it ever has to be.
The prices are on the site rather than behind a form because I would rather you self-select. Websites from £500, hosting and care from £50 a month, growth blocks from £250 a month. Those three numbers are the arrangement. Anything outside them — a third-party licence, a specialist such as a photographer, a piece of work beyond the agreed scope — is agreed with you in writing before it is spent, and it appears on the invoice as exactly what it is.
Something I got wrong
On a large e-commerce build, one of the caching layers looked like it was working and was not: a data cache silently refused to store entries above a size limit, so a query that appeared to run once a day was in fact running on every single render. Nothing errored and nothing logged. The only visible symptom was a hosting bill climbing month after month for reasons nobody could explain, and it cost real money before I found it.
I mention it because a page full of successes tells you very little about how somebody works. What that one changed: I now measure the thing rather than trusting that it is configured, and anything that can fail silently is made to report what it did. The same instinct is why the Merchant Centre sync on Beds.ie logs its rejections rather than dropping them.
Working with a small studio
The honest version, because it is what people are actually weighing up when they search for a small studio and then go looking for reasons to trust it.
- You own everything. Domain in your name, hosting in your account, a full working copy of the site if you leave, and no exit fee.
- There is no minimum term on anything. Hosting is monthly, growth blocks are monthly, and you can stop either whenever you see fit.
- You get the same person every time, so nobody has to be brought up to speed and a few hours a month goes much further than it would elsewhere.
- The trade-off is real: one person cannot be in four places at once. If I am ill or away you will be told, and if I am full I will say so rather than take the work and do it badly.
- The design, the build, the SEO and the artwork are done here, by me. If a project ever needs a specialist, you are told first and it appears on the quote before it happens.
How I talk about results
If there is a number on this site, I can show you where it came from. Every figure in the case studies names its source and the date it was read — Search Console, Merchant Centre logs, browser timing data. There are no industry averages dressed up as our results, no review counts that do not match reviews you can go and read, and exactly one figure that a client measured rather than me, which is labelled as such everywhere it appears.
The full policy — which tools, which windows, and what is deliberately not published — is written down on how we measure. It exists so that the claim in the paragraph above is checkable rather than merely stated.
