Why we publish our prices

Look at ten UK web studios and you will find perhaps one with a price on the site. The rest have a contact form and a promise to discuss your requirements. We went the other way: four published prices, a full rate card, and a configurator that gives you a number in about two minutes without talking to anyone.

People assume this is a marketing tactic. It is partly a commercial decision, and it costs us things, so it seems worth explaining rather than presenting as a virtue.

Why studios hide the number

There are real reasons, and it is worth being fair about them before disagreeing.

• Scope genuinely varies. A five-page site and a fifteen-page site with a booking system are not the same job, and one number cannot describe both.
• A price with no context loses on price alone. A visitor who sees £3,950 and leaves never hears why it is £3,950.
• Anchoring works. A quote written after a discovery call can be shaped to what the client has revealed about their budget.
• It is a competitive disclosure. Every rival can read your rate card.

The first two are legitimate problems. The third is the one worth naming honestly: a price set after learning what you can afford is not a price, it is a negotiation, and the customer is always the less-informed party in it.

What it costs us

Publishing is not free. Three things get worse.

We lose enquiries we would have won. Somebody with a £2,000 budget looking at Growth at £3,950 leaves without ever finding out that Launch exists at £1,750. A phone call would have recovered some of those.

We cannot flex upward. A client with more money to spend gets the same number as everyone else. Studios that quote per project capture that difference; we do not.

Competitors can read it. They can, and they do. We decided this matters less than it feels like it should — the price is the easiest thing to copy and the least useful thing to have copied, because it is the delivery behind it that is hard.

What it buys

It filters. Most of the value is here. The enquiries that arrive have already seen the number and are not surprised by it, which removes the single most common way a web project dies — three weeks of discovery ending in "that is more than we thought".

It removes the worst meeting in the industry. The one where the client is trying to work out what to admit about their budget and the studio is trying to work out what to charge. Both sides leave it slightly worse disposed towards the other.

It makes the scope boundaries real. If a price is fixed and published, the thing that defines it has to be published too. So each package page says what it includes and what pushes a project into the next tier — up to five pages for Launch, up to fifteen for Growth, and so on. That is a constraint on us as much as information for you.

It is checkable. Everything we claim on this site can be verified from the site itself. The price is on the pricing page, the configurator produces the same number, and the checkout charges it. If those three ever disagreed, you could see it.

How far we take it

Reasonably far. The pricing page carries the four build prices, the four care-plan tiers, the add-ons and the growth-service rates. The configurator asks about six things and prices your actual build, including the add-ons, and saves the quote to a link you can share with whoever signs it off.

Where we stop: we do not publish what a project costs us, and we do not publish the negotiating positions behind a fixed price. Those are ordinary commercial confidentiality rather than the thing being argued about here. The distinction we are drawing is between hiding your price from a customer, which we think is bad practice, and running a business with internal numbers, which every business does.

The test we hold ourselves to

Everything on this site should be checkable, and nothing on it should be a number about ourselves. No years trading, no client count, no review score, no badge announcing how many businesses have supposedly put their faith in us. Those are the numbers that are easiest to inflate and hardest to verify, so we do not use them at all — which is also why you will not find a testimonial carousel here until there are real ones to put in it.

More about how we work, if that is the sort of thing you want to know before spending money with someone.