Pay monthly website design

Why the old way stopped working

The traditional arrangement was a few thousand pounds upfront for a build, and then you were on your own. For a small business that produced two predictable problems.

The first was the capital. £3,000 to £5,000 before a single enquiry arrives is a genuine barrier when the money could buy a van, a chair or stock.

The second was worse. Once the invoice was paid, nobody had any reason to touch the site again. Prices went out of date, the contact form broke and nobody noticed, the plugin that handled the gallery stopped being maintained. Three years later the site is slower than it was, wrong in a dozen small ways, and the only route forward is to pay a few thousand pounds again.

A monthly fee changes the incentive. We are still here next year, so it is our problem too.

What £45 a month actually includes

• The design and build. Written and built from scratch for your trade, not a template with your logo dropped in.
• UK hosting, SSL and your domain. No separate hosting bill arriving from somewhere else in six months.
• Support, by phone and email, from the person who built it.
• An hour of changes every month on Starter, two on Business, four on Growth. Prices, staff, opening hours, a new service — send it over.
• Updates, backups and monitoring, continuously, without being asked.
• No upfront fee at all. The first payment is the first month.

The full breakdown of each plan is on the pricing page.

The trade-off, stated plainly

There is one, and most pay-monthly web companies are vague about it. On a monthly plan, we retain ownership of the website design and code for as long as the plan is running. That is precisely what lets us build it without charging you for the build.

What is unambiguously yours, throughout and afterwards: your domain name, your content, your images, your logo and your copy. Those never belong to us. And after the 12-month minimum term you can buy the site outright at any point — we quote a figure, you pay it, the design and code become yours.

If owning the code from day one matters to you, buy outright instead. It starts at £1495 and ownership transfers on final payment. We would rather sell you that than have you discover the arrangement later.

When monthly is cheaper, and when it isn’t

Here is the arithmetic nobody in this trade publishes. Compare the £45 Starter plan against buying outright at £1495 and then paying £15 a month for hosting and care:

• Year one. Monthly costs £540. Outright costs £1,675. Monthly is far cheaper.
• Year three. Monthly has cost £1,620. Outright has cost £2,035. Monthly is still ahead.
• Around month fifty — a little over four years — they cross over. After that, outright is cheaper.

So the rule is simple: for the first four years monthly costs less and includes more. Beyond that, if you are confident you will want no real changes, buying outright wins on pure cost.

Two honest caveats. The monthly plan includes an hour of changes a month where hosting and care includes thirty minutes, so they are not quite like for like. And a site nobody touches for four years is usually a site that has quietly stopped working — which is the problem the monthly model exists to solve.

What happens after the minimum term

The 12 months run from the day the site goes live. After that the plan simply continues month to month, and either of us can end it with 30 days’ notice. There is no exit fee and no final invoice.

If you cancel inside the minimum term, the remaining months become payable — because we carried the build cost upfront rather than charging you for it. That is the whole mechanism, and it is in the terms in plain words.