How we price a website

The question we are asked most in first meetings is how much a website costs, and the honest answer is that we do not know yet. What we can say is how we will work it out, what usually moves the number and what it will not include. Our websites currently run from about £60,000 to £110,000, take ten to sixteen weeks and are built by a team of four, led by a partner. This is where those figures come from.

Every website starts with two weeks of discovery for a fixed £8,000, credited against the project if you go ahead. In those two weeks we interview your team and some of your customers, audit what you have, list every page and template the new site needs, and look hard at the parts that connect to something else: a booking engine, a shop, a membership area, a stock system. At the end you get a sitemap, a content inventory and a fixed fee for each remaining phase. Before discovery any figure we gave you would be a guess, and guesses in proposals tend to be either padded or wrong.

What moves the number

It is rarely the number of pages. A site of forty pages built from six templates can cost less than a site of twelve pages that each need their own design. What does move the fee, roughly in order:

• Templates. Each distinct page type has to be designed, built, filled and tested on thirty real devices.
• Integrations. A booking engine or a shop is often a third of the build, because most of the work is in the edge cases: sold-out dates, failed payments, refunds.
• Content. Who writes the words and who sources the pictures. Writing a site from scratch adds two to three weeks.
• Motion. A real motion layer takes more engineering time, and is worth it only where it helps people understand something.
• Languages. Planned from the start, a second language is closer to a fifth more work than to twice as much.

Clients do not buy hours. They buy a website that works on the day it launches.

Why fixed, and why per phase

We price each phase as a fixed fee because a timesheet turns every conversation into one about hours instead of outcomes. If a page takes us longer than we planned, that is our problem. Two rounds of revisions are built into every phase, which in our experience is enough when the brief is clear. Pricing per phase, rather than the whole project at once, lets the fee follow what we learn. Design is priced at the end of discovery and the build at the end of design, inside a range agreed at the start so there are no surprises. We invoice monthly against the plan, so the money follows the work.

What is not in the fee

Photography, typeface licences and any paid services are passed on at cost and quoted before we commit to them, and everything is licensed in your company’s name. Anything new that turns up mid-project, a second market or a new product line, gets a one-page change note with its own price before we start it. You decide whether it happens. After launch, thirty days of support are included. Most clients then keep a small retainer for the studio days they need, from £6,000 a month, with the same people who built the site.

The proposal is two pages

Our proposals are two pages long: what we will make, who will make it, how long it will take and what each phase costs. If a website proposal needs thirty pages to explain its price, it is usually explaining hours. We would rather you knew exactly what you were paying for, and could hold us to it.