What we charge, and why we publish it
You can't build a client proposal on "get in touch". So here are the numbers, and the reasoning behind each of them.
Most of this industry hides its rates behind a contact form. The stated reason is that every project is different, which is true and beside the point. The actual reason, most of the time, is that pricing is set per client based on what they appear able to pay.
That is a defensible way to run a business. It is an impossible way to be a build partner. If you can't quote your client until we have quoted you, we've added three to five days to your sales process and made you look slow to somebody you're trying to win. Worse, you've had to disclose your client's budget to us before we give you a number, which puts you in a bad position in a conversation you shouldn't have to have at all.
So we publish. Here is what the numbers are and, more usefully, why they're those numbers.
Builds from £6,000
Fixed, quoted per project, agreed in writing before anyone starts. Fixed rather than time-and-materials because that puts the estimating risk on us, which is where it belongs — we're the ones who know how long a Craft build takes, and asking a design studio to carry that risk is asking them to underwrite something they can't assess.
What moves the number: the count of genuinely distinct components, not the count of pages. Ten pages built from eight components is a smaller job than four pages built from twenty. Whether there's a migration and how much content is coming across. How many locales. Whether commerce is involved, which changes the shape of everything. Whether integrations exist and whether their documentation is any good.
What doesn't move it: how large your client is, how much they're paying you, or how well the project is going for you commercially. We're pricing our hours, not your relationship. A studio that discovers its build partner charges more when the end client is a bank learns something about that partner it can't unlearn.
The £6,000 floor is a genuine floor rather than a marketing device. Below that, the fixed costs of a project — kickoff, environment setup, review rounds, launch, handover — start to dominate, and we'd be doing it badly or losing money. If your project is smaller than that, the honest answer is that hourly is a better fit, and we'll tell you so.
Ad-hoc at £150 an hour
No minimum, no retainer, no block of hours to buy up front, no expiry. Useful for amends after launch, a feature the client thought of in month four, an integration that changed under you, or twenty minutes of second opinion when something is behaving oddly and you'd rather ask than spend an afternoon guessing.
We charge properly for small work deliberately. Cheap hourly rates create an incentive to be slow, and they attract the kind of engagement where nobody's quite sure what's being paid for. We would rather be quick and expensive than the reverse, and we'd rather you felt able to ask a fifteen-minute question than felt you had to bundle it into something bigger to justify calling.
Time is logged in fifteen-minute increments and itemised. If something takes less time than expected, the invoice is smaller. That should not be remarkable and yet it frequently is.
Hosting and care from £75 a month
Managed hosting, backups, uptime monitoring, and — the part that matters — Craft and plugin updates within your current major version, included rather than invoiced.
That inclusion is a deliberate structural decision, not a generosity. If patching is billable, it requires an approval. Approvals require someone to be available, to understand why it matters, and to decide it's worth the money this month. In practice, that means patching gets deferred, then skipped, then forgotten — and skipped patching is the single most common way a site gets compromised.
By making it included, nobody has to decide. It simply happens, on a schedule, and the only time you hear from us about it is if something needs your attention.
Major version upgrades are quoted separately, because they are a project rather than a patch: templates change, plugins need compatible versions, there's testing, and there's a deployment window. Pricing that as maintenance would mean either doing it badly or quietly not doing it, and both are worse than an honest quote.
If patching is billable, it gets skipped. That's the whole reason it isn't.
What you do with these numbers
Mark them up. That is the entire commercial model, and we'd rather be direct about it than pretend there's something more elegant going on. UK studios commonly report somewhere in the region of 40–60% gross margin on white-labelled build work, and the reason that works is precisely that our number is knowable in advance.
You can put a figure in a proposal on the day of the conversation. You can decide your own margin rather than reverse-engineering it from a quote that took us four days to produce. And when the client asks what happens if they want changes later, you have an hourly rate to quote rather than a promise to find out.
What we won't do on price
We don't discount for volume. The tenth build takes about as long as the first. A volume discount would either be fictional or would mean the first nine were overpriced.
We don't do free pitch work. Speculative building is a tax on the studios who don't win, and it gets recovered from the ones who do.
We don't quote low and recover it through variations. Every studio has been on the receiving end of a partner who priced to win and then found scope everywhere. It poisons a working relationship inside one project, and it's the fastest way we know to never work with someone twice.
We don't charge for the first conversation, or the second. Scoping is sales. If we spend an hour on a call working out whether a project is a fit, that's our cost of doing business, not yours.
The comparison that actually matters
The number worth holding these against isn't another agency's rate card. It's the cost of the alternative. A senior developer on staff is a fixed monthly cost regardless of whether a build is in the studio that month; a partner is a variable cost that appears only when the work does. Which is cheaper depends entirely on how continuous your pipeline is, and that's a question only you can answer.
We'd rather you did that arithmetic properly and concluded you should hire, than engaged us because we were the option you could get a number out of quickly. Though we do think being the option you can get a number out of quickly is worth something on its own.