pricing / no phone-call-for-a-number
In the UK, a properly set-up builder site starts around £1,000, a custom-coded website runs £5,000–£10,000, a bespoke CMS £5,000–£10,000, and a substantial system or web app from £25,000. outhang caps estimates at £100,000 and always recommends the cheapest route that genuinely fits.
the five routes and what they cost
£1,000 – £3,000
1–3 weeks
Wix, Squarespace or Shopify, set up and designed properly rather than dropped into a template.
Best for: A new business or a first credible home for an idea.
£3,500 – £8,000
3–8 weeks
WordPress built as a real content system with hand-built fields and templates, not a page-builder pile.
Best for: Content-led businesses whose team publishes regularly.
£5,000 – £10,000
4–10 weeks
Written from scratch. No template ceiling, no monthly platform tax, code owned by you.
Best for: Brands whose website has to look and feel like nobody else's.
£5,000 – £10,000
4–8 weeks
A content and records system shaped around how your business actually works.
Best for: Teams outgrowing spreadsheets and shared folders.
£25,000+
8–24 weeks
A product: logins, permissions, automation, payments, integrations, the lot.
Best for: Businesses whose operations are the thing that needs building.
Answer twelve quick questions and you get three priced tiers, a week range and a briefing document you can keep — before anyone calls you.
These are the brackets our estimator works in, so the number you get from the guided brief will sit inside them. Estimates cap at £100,000 — beyond that we scope and phase the work before putting a number on it.
what pushes a price up
| what changes | effect on price | why |
|---|---|---|
| logins and permissions | significant | Accounts, roles and who-can-see-what is the single biggest jump in cost. It changes the build from pages to a product. |
| money moving through it | significant | Payments, subscriptions, invoicing and refunds need care, testing and an audit trail. |
| integrations | moderate | Each system you connect — payments, calendars, email, CRM, maps, AI — adds roughly £600–£1,800. |
| scale of content | moderate | Six pages versus six hundred records changes the structure, the admin and the search work. |
| a hard deadline | small | Compressing a timeline costs around a tenth more because work runs in parallel rather than in sequence. |
| brand from scratch | moderate | Naming, identity and art direction is separate work — around £4,500 on its own. |
the questions everyone asks
For a small business in the UK, a well set-up builder site starts around £1,000, a custom-coded website runs roughly £5,000–£10,000, a bespoke CMS £5,000–£10,000, and a substantial system or web app from £25,000. Our estimates are capped at £100,000; anything larger is scoped and phased before a number is given.
They are usually different products. The cheap quote is normally a template filled in with your content on a platform you rent. The higher figure is design, code, structure and search work made for your business, owned by you, with someone accountable for how it performs.
Expect a domain at roughly £10–£20 a year and hosting from nothing to around £30 a month depending on traffic. Builder platforms charge £15–£40 a month per site. Beyond that, cost depends on whether you want us maintaining and improving it — support starts around £1,500 for a block of work.
Fixed price against a written scope for defined projects, so you know the number before we start. Ongoing work and open-ended discovery are charged in blocks so you are never paying for time you cannot see.
Scale, logins, money moving through the system, and integrations. A site with five pages and no accounts is a fraction of one with permissions, payments and a calendar sync. Rushing a deadline adds a little; being flexible saves a little.
Yes, and it is often the right call. We will recommend the cheapest route that genuinely fits, get you live, then build the expensive parts once real usage tells us what they should be.
go deeper
The routes explained properly, and the maths behind the numbers.
start somewhere
Answer a few quick questions and we will come back with a price bracket, a timeline and a scope you can hold us to.