Thinking · 17 September 2026
Why we publish our prices
Most agency sites will not tell you what anything costs. Here is what that silence is actually for, and why ours says £4,000 to £8,000 on the page.
Go and look at ten agency websites. Count how many tell you what a website costs. In our experience it is one, maybe two, and the one that does is usually the cheapest. Everyone else has a contact form and a sentence about how every project is unique.
Every project is unique. That is true and it is also not the reason.
What the silence is for
There are three real reasons an agency keeps its prices off the website, and only one of them is about you.
The first is price discovery. If the number is not published, it can be set after the conversation, once the agency knows your turnover, your funding round, and how badly you need this finished before the trade show. The same eight-page website is £6,000 for a plumber and £30,000 for a fintech. Nobody says this out loud, but it is the single biggest reason the page says “get in touch”.
The second is anchoring. A number on a page is a number you can compare, and comparison is the enemy of a margin. A number delivered at the end of a well-run pitch, after two calls and a deck, arrives with a great deal more context wrapped around it.
The third is the honest one: scope genuinely varies, and a single figure would be a lie. Fair enough. But a range is not a lie, and almost nobody publishes one of those either.
What publishing costs us
It would be tidier to claim this is pure principle. It is not. Publishing prices has a cost, and it is worth being straight about what it is.
We lose people we could have talked round. Someone who sees £10,000 to £15,000 and quietly closes the tab might, after a conversation about what the current site is actually costing them in lost enquiries, have concluded it was worth it. We never get that conversation. That is a real loss and we accept it.
We also have to hold the price. Once £4,000 to £8,000 is on the page, a quote of £11,000 for something that plainly sits in that band is not a negotiation, it is a contradiction. Publishing removes an option we would otherwise have had.
Why we do it anyway
Because the alternative wastes everybody’s time, and most of the time wasted is the client’s.
If your budget is £2,000 and the work starts at £4,000, the useful thing is for you to know that in eight seconds on a web page, not after a discovery call, a follow-up, and a proposal that arrives four days later. You are not a lead to be nurtured toward a number. You are someone with a budget trying to find out if it is enough.
It also forces us to be precise. You cannot publish a range without deciding what is in it and what is not, which is why the tiers say how many pages, how many weeks, and what is configured before launch. Agencies that quote privately can leave scope comfortably vague until the invoice. We cannot, and that is the point.
What actually moves the number
The range is real, so it is worth saying what puts a project at the top of one rather than the bottom.
Page count is the obvious one, but it is rarely the expensive part. What moves the number is whether content exists, whether anything has to be migrated, and whether the site has to talk to something else — a booking system, a CRM, a stock feed. A ten-page site where the copy is written and nothing integrates is cheaper than a five-page site pulling live availability from a system with no documentation.
The other thing that moves it is how many decisions are outstanding. A project where nobody has decided what the business actually does costs more than one where that is settled, because the deciding happens on our time.
The test
If you are choosing between agencies, ask the ones that will not publish a price what a site like yours normally costs. Not a quote — a range, on the phone, in the first two minutes. Anyone who has built the thing before can answer that immediately.
A long pause is information.