Website cost in London ranges from £299 (single landing page, freelancer) to £30,000+ (premium agency, full design system). Most SME marketing sites land in the £1,500–£6,000 range; complex e-commerce or SaaS sites £6,000–£25,000. Below £299 is template territory; above £30,000 buys mostly polish, not capability.
Tier 1 (£0–£299): templates, builders (Wix, Squarespace, Carrd), basic Webflow templates. Fine for solopreneurs and validation-stage projects.
Tier 2 (£300–£1,500): freelancer Webflow / WordPress, single-page-app landing pages, simple bespoke marketing sites. Most SME founders should be here for v1.
Tier 3 (£1,500–£6,000): mid-tier London agency or senior freelancer team, 8–15 page CMS-driven Webflow / Next.js, full SEO, custom design system foundations. Right for funded startups and established SMEs.
Tier 4 (£6,000–£30,000+): premium identity-led agency, complex animations, programmatic SEO templates, multi-locale, headless commerce. Right for Series-A+ scale-ups, premium consumer brands, and enterprise B2B.
Six factors compound the cost: (1) page count, (2) custom design depth, (3) animation complexity, (4) integrations (CMS, CRM, payments, ERP), (5) seniority of team, (6) brand and SEO strategy work bundled into the engagement.
A 5-page brochure site for a personal trainer is £800–£2,000. A 25-page B2B SaaS site with bespoke design system, programmatic SEO, comparison-page templates, and HubSpot CRM integration is £6,000–£15,000. Same 'website' — very different scope.
"Page count is a poor proxy for cost. Custom design system depth and integrations explain 70% of the price gap between a £1,500 site and a £15,000 site."
London agencies charge 30–60% premium over regional UK agencies for comparable scope. The premium reflects: London labour costs (£500–£1,200/day senior maker rates vs £350–£700 outside London), studio overhead (Shoreditch EC2A office rents are 4x Manchester), and project-management capacity (London agencies typically run 3–5 active projects per PM vs 1–2 regionally).
For most clients, the right answer is to pick London for strategy work (where senior judgement matters) and to pick regional or remote-first for execution (where good processes scale labour).
Our published rates aim to set the floor: £299 landing page, £1,459 brand site (5–10 pages), £1,999 Shopify store, £1,299 Webflow build, £1,999 starter web app. Each is fixed-scope and includes the same 30-day post-launch support, free strategy call, and senior maker on every brief that the higher tiers get.
Below those, you're either in template-builder territory (Wix, Squarespace) or in offshore freelancer territory (Fiverr, Upwork) where the work quality is binary — great or terrible — and the cost of getting it wrong (rework, brand damage, slower launch) often exceeds the saving.
Hosting (Webflow CMS £19/mo, Next.js / Vercel free–£25/mo, WordPress hosting £5–£30/mo). Domain (£10–£15/yr). Stock imagery (£0–£200 if you avoid premium libraries; Unsplash is free). Plugins / apps (WordPress: easily £200–£800/yr in plugin renewals; Shopify: £200–£500/mo in app subscriptions for mid-tier stores).
Ongoing maintenance: most sites need £100–£500/mo for content updates, plugin patches, security maintenance, and small design tweaks. Below that, sites drift into staleness within 12 months.
Pay more when: brand is the product (premium consumer, hospitality, lifestyle), you're raising at £5m+ valuation and investors will see the site, you need bespoke integrations no template handles, or you sell B2B and the website carries the £30k+ ACV signal.
Pay less when: you're validating product-market fit and need v1 fast, you're a service business below £500k revenue, or you have in-house capability to extend a starting framework. We'd genuinely recommend the £299 landing page over a £15,000 brand site for most pre-traction founders — spend the saved £14,700 on customer acquisition.