Pricing
Clear pricing. Room to grow.
A project fee for the website, a monthly for hosting & care, and — when you want the site to earn more — a block of growth hours. No management fees, no percentage of ad spend, no minimum term.
Prices correct at 4 September 2026 · published by Simon
01 · Website
from £500project fee
Deliberately competitive. We do not make our money on the build — we make it growing the business the site belongs to. Large e-commerce and custom builds are priced on application, from the hours the work takes. Every site is bespoke — no themes.
What a build includes02 · Hosting & care
from £50a month
Where the site lives, kept fast, secure and current with browser and Google changes. Small fixes included.
What hosting covers03 · Growth
from £250a month
A block of hours spent on whatever grows the business: SEO, AI optimisation, ads, conversion, tracking, social, artwork.
How the blocks work04 · AI builds
on applicationquoted from hours
Receptionists, integrations, automations and agents. It then runs on your own account at the provider’s price — nothing is resold at a markup.
What can be builtHosting & care · from £50 a month
Keeps the site alive, and current.
Technology moves. Browsers change what counts as fast, Google changes what it rewards, plugins need patching. Hosting & care is the monthly that keeps a £500 site behaving like a new one.
Fast managed hosting and SSL
Platform, plugin and security updates
Daily off-site backups and uptime monitoring
Small fixes and content tweaks as they come up
Kept current with browser and Google changes
Growth blocks
Pick the hours. Grow into the next one.
Where the business actually is. Spent on whatever moves the needle — never a percentage of your ad spend, which some agencies set at up to 40%. No minimum term. Move up, move down or stop whenever you see fit.
£250/mo
4 hours a month
Local businesses that want steady, measured progress on search and enquiries without an agency retainer.
Talk about Starter£500/mo
8 hours a month
Established businesses ready to run ads and SEO together, with conversion work driven by real numbers.
Talk about Steady- Most popular
£750/mo
12 hours a month
Businesses treating the website as a sales channel and wanting month-on-month growth they can see in the dashboard.
Includes the client dashboard
Talk about GrowthGrowth typically looks like
- SEO, ads and AI optimisation run together
- Conversion work driven by your analytics
- Reporting you can read, plus the dashboard
Examples of how a block gets spent — the actual mix follows what your business needs that month.
£1000/mo
16 hours a month
Companies that want an outsourced marketing department rather than a supplier.
Includes the client dashboard
Talk about Partner
What £500 buys
A worked example, not a philosophy.
For example: a focused site for a local trade or service business. Around five pages — home, a page for each main service, about, and a contact page whose form lands in your inbox — built bespoke rather than from a theme, fast on a phone, with analytics and Search Console set up on the day it goes live. A site like that is usually live within four to six weeks of starting, and the thing that decides the date is almost always how quickly the words and photographs come together, not the build.
What you bring: the content, or the raw material for it, and your photographs where the business has them. What I bring: the structure, the design, the writing where it is needed, the build and the measurement. What the quote fixes in writing before anything starts: the pages, what each of us supplies, the review rounds, the payment stages and the launch date.
After launch there are two recurring costs and no others from us: hosting & care from £50 a month, and the domain, which is registered in your name at the registrar’s own price, typically a few pounds a year. A growth block is optional, and optional means optional: build plus hosting is a complete arrangement, and plenty of clients never take one.
A shop, a booking flow, a calculator or a large catalogue is not a £500 job, and I will say so in the first reply rather than after a deposit.
For context
What a Manchester website usually costs.
Manchester has an unusually deep web design market for a UK city outside London, and the quotes reflect it: the same five-page site is priced anywhere from a few hundred pounds to five figures depending entirely on who you ask. What makes that hard to navigate is that almost nobody publishes a number. On 4 September 2026 I read the live UK search results for “web design manchester” and checked what each ranking studio actually shows a visitor: exactly one displays a starting price without a form — Designers Up North, whose own result reads “from £1500”.
Realistically, a Greater Manchester business should budget £500 to £2,000 for a bespoke site that is fast on a phone and structured so each service and area can rank for its own search, then around £50 a month to keep it that way. A shop, or anything with a booking flow or a calculation in it, is a bigger job and should be scoped properly before anybody quotes a number.
The full breakdown — the bands, what changes the price, the costs that arrive after launch, and the seven questions that make two quotes comparable — is in the guide to what a website costs.
Straight answers
Questions about money.
What is priced on application, and why?
Large e-commerce and custom builds are priced on application, from the hours the work takes. Every site is bespoke — no themes. A focused site for a local business genuinely starts at £500. A 17,000-product catalogue, a custom booking flow or an AI integration is priced from the hours it takes, agreed in writing before anything starts — quoting a flat figure for work that has not been scoped is how projects go wrong.
Do you use templates or page builders?
No. Every site is a bespoke build with the functionality written for the business — which is why a page renders from eleven requests rather than a hundred, and why an unusual way of selling is a design decision rather than a limitation.
Which platforms do you build on?
WordPress, WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, Next.js, Supabase, Railway. WordPress and WooCommerce for most businesses, Shopify or Magento where the platform should carry the operational weight, and Next.js with Supabase or Railway where something genuinely custom is needed.
How can a website be £500?
Deliberately competitive. We do not make our money on the build — we make it growing the business the site belongs to. A focused site for a local business genuinely starts there. Bigger jobs — e-commerce catalogues, custom systems — are quoted after a conversation, and I will tell you straight when a project is not a £500 project.
What does hosting & care cover?
From £50 a month, it pays for where the site lives and keeps it current: fast managed hosting and ssl, platform, plugin and security updates, daily off-site backups and uptime monitoring, small fixes and content tweaks as they come up, kept current with browser and google changes. It is the difference between a site that quietly rots and one that is still fast in three years.
Do I have to take a growth block?
No. Build plus hosting is a complete arrangement. The growth block is for when you want the site to earn more — and most clients get there once the numbers start coming in.
Are there management fees, setup fees or a percentage of ad spend?
No, no, and no. Three numbers: the build, the hosting, and — if you want it — the growth block. Nothing else appears on an invoice.
Is there a contract?
Hosting is monthly. Growth blocks are monthly. No minimum term. Move up, move down or stop whenever you see fit.
How much do web designers charge in Manchester?
Anywhere from a few hundred pounds to five figures, and almost nobody publishes a number — on the live Manchester search result read on 4 September 2026, exactly one ranking studio displays a starting price at all. Realistically, budget £500 to £2,000 for a bespoke site from a small studio, plus £50 a month to keep it current.
Are these prices up to date?
Yes — correct at 4 September 2026, which is stated on the page rather than left for you to guess. If they change, that date changes with them.
Want a number for your site?
Tell me what you sell, who buys it and what the current site is not doing. You get a straight reply with what I would build, what it costs, and whether a growth block is worth it yet.