Someone sent me a competitor's price page this week and asked, reasonably, why they should pay me £3,500 when a firm down the road will do it for £28 a month. It is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer, with the arithmetic rather than adjectives.
What the monthly fee is actually buying
The £28-a-month website is a subscription. The pattern is the same whichever franchise or platform is selling it. You pay a deposit, somewhere between £350 and £950, and then a monthly fee for a minimum term of twelve or twenty-four months. A consultant assembles your pages on the platform's builder, from the platform's themes. Hosting, an editor and a support line are included.
The site lives on their system. When you stop paying, the site stops. You cannot take it to another host, because there is nothing to take: the design is a theme on their platform and the pages are rows in their database. The domain is sometimes yours, the website never is.
That is rent. Rent is a legitimate thing to sell, and for some businesses it is the right thing to buy. A sole trader who needs five pages that say who they are and how to ring them, and will never need the site to do more, is making a sensible decision at £28 a month. I will say so on a discovery call, and I set my minimum engagement at £1,500 so that nobody pays me to find that out.
What I am selling instead
Code, in a repository you own. A domain in your name. Content in files or a content studio you control. Hosting on infrastructure you could move off in an afternoon. A design made for your business, not a theme that a hundred other businesses are also wearing.
Every site is static-first, so every word is in the HTML and readable by Google and the AI assistants with JavaScript switched off. I wrote up that test if you want to run it on a subscription site. The structured data, the llms.txt and the pages are generated from one set of content, so they cannot disagree with each other.
The difference in a sentence: a subscription site is a line on your overheads, and a site you own is an asset of the business.
The two-year arithmetic
Here are the figures, excluding VAT, over twenty-four months.
- Subscription, cheapest plan I have seen locally. £350 deposit, then £28 a month on a 24-month term. About £1,020 over two years, then £28 a month for as long as you want the site to exist. At the end you own nothing.
- My Launch build, fixed fee. £3,500, then nothing compulsory. If you want me to host and look after it, Essential care is £95 a month on thirty days' notice. About £5,780 over two years with care, or £3,500 without. At the end you own everything.
- My Foundation plan. £875 to set up and £375 a month for twelve months, which pays for the same Launch build in instalments with care and search foundations included. From month thirteen it is £95 a month. About £6,500 over two years. At the end you own everything.
So over two years I am between three and six times the price. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I am not going to match it, because I would have to sell the same thing to do so.
What the difference pays for
- An exit. You can leave at any point after launch and everything comes with you. On a subscription, leaving means starting again.
- A design that is yours. Not a theme, not a layout shared with the other franchisees' clients, and not a drag-and-drop editor you are afraid to touch.
- Build quality you can measure. Core Web Vitals green at handover. The words in the HTML. LocalBusiness schema that agrees with your Google profile, which is most of what local search runs on.
- One person who built it. When something needs changing, you talk to the person who wrote it, not a platform's helpdesk working from a ticket.
- No lock-in afterwards. Every care plan is thirty days' notice, and none is compulsory.
The one question to ask before you sign
"If I stop paying, what do I keep?"
The honest answer from a subscription is nothing, or the domain. The honest answer from me is everything. If anyone's answer involves a migration fee, a licence or a "that's not possible", you are being quoted rent, and you should price it as rent: the monthly fee multiplied by every month you intend to be in business.
A second question is worth asking of anyone, me included: "Can I move this site to another host tomorrow?" If the answer is yes, you are buying. If it is no, you are renting.
What this does not mean
It does not mean subscription websites are a trick. They are rent, clearly priced, and plenty of businesses are right to rent. It does not mean my sites are right for everyone; if the budget is under £1,500, a DIY builder or a subscription genuinely serves you better and I will tell you so. And it does not mean a dearer site ranks higher. Nobody can promise rankings. Ownership and a clean build give Google and the assistants something accurate to read; the rest is work, and it is priced separately and in the open.
Paul Redman runs Redman Studio, an independent web design and engineering studio in Watford, Hertfordshire. Every fee in this post is on the published price list, and the discovery call is free.