What it costs
Where a £349 website comes from, and where a £5,000 one does.
Both exist, both are real products, and they are not the same thing sold at different prices. This page explains what is actually different, and what to check before you buy either.
I should say plainly that I sell websites to clinics for £297 a month, so I am not a neutral party. Everything below is checkable, and where the cheap option is the right one for you it says so.
The three bands
What your money is buying at each price.
£0 to £500 one-off · or £20 to £50 a month
A template, filled in.
- Production is usually offshore, which is a genuine cost difference rather than a worse version of the same thing.
- Shared hosting, a stock theme, and your logo and text dropped into it.
- No sales call, no discovery, no writing. You supply the words or the words are generic.
Right for you if:
You are a sole trader, you need an address on the internet, and nearly all your work comes from word of mouth. This is genuinely the correct purchase and anybody telling you otherwise is selling.
Wrong for you if:
You want to be found for treatments you offer, in a town, ahead of six competitors. A template will not do that, because the pages that would do it do not exist.
£2,000 to £6,000 one-off · plus hosting and changes
A custom build from a small agency or a freelancer.
- Somebody sits down with you, works out the structure, and writes pages around what you actually do.
- You own the code. Hosting, changes and support are usually billed separately afterwards.
- Quality varies enormously in this band, which is why the checks further down matter most here.
Right for you if:
You have the cash, you want to own the asset outright, and you have somebody who will keep it maintained afterwards.
Wrong for you if:
The money leaves before you know whether it works, and the most common outcome is a good site that nobody touches again for four years.
£300 to £800 a month · often with a build fee on top
A UK agency on a retainer.
- Build, hosting, changes, reporting and usually some marketing, bundled.
- There is an account manager, an office and a sales team, and all three are in the price.
- Frequently a twelve-month minimum term, sometimes with a build fee as well.
Right for you if:
You want somebody else to own the whole marketing problem and you have the budget for it.
Wrong for you if:
You are paying for overhead you never meet. And a twelve-month minimum priced monthly is an annual contract in instalments.
No company is named anywhere on this page, deliberately. The bands are the model, not the businesses, and there are good and bad operators in all three.
The honest bit
Cheap is not a con. It is a different cost base.
A website at £349, or at thirty pounds a month, is not the same product built by somebody willing to take less. It is a genuinely different production model: templates rather than custom structure, offshore production rather than UK time, no discovery call, no writing, and shared hosting.
Every one of those is a real cost removed rather than a corner cut, and the result is a real product. For a lot of businesses it is the right one. If your work comes from recommendation and you need somewhere for people to check you exist, spending three thousand pounds instead would be the actual mistake.
Where it stops being the right answer is when you want the website to bring work. That needs a page per treatment, written for your town, structured so search engines and AI assistants can read it, and something that catches the enquiry when it arrives. None of that is in a template, at any price, because it is the part that takes somebody's time.
Before you sign
Five checks, whoever you are talking to.
Including me. If somebody dodges these, that is your answer.
Open three sites from the portfolio
Not look at the screenshots. Open them. If one 404s or lands on a parked domain, you have learned more than the call will tell you.
Ask who does the build
In-house or offshore. Both are legitimate. Being given a vague answer is the problem, not the answer itself.
Ask what happens if you leave
Do you keep the site, the code, the domain, the content and the email? Get it in writing before you sign, not after you are unhappy.
Check the minimum term
A monthly price with a twelve-month tie-in is an annual contract. That is fine if you know. It is not fine if you find out in month two.
Ask who owns the domain
It must be registered in your name. This is the single most common way a small business ends up unable to leave.
And for completeness
What I charge, and where it sits.
£297 a month, no build fee, no minimum term. That is below the UK agency band because there is no account manager, no office and no sales team in the price, and above the template band because somebody writes the pages.
The website runs on my hosting. If you stop paying it stops serving, which is exactly how there is no build fee. After three months you can buy the code outright for £1,000 and it will run anywhere.
Questions
What people ask about price.
Is a £349 website a scam?
No. It is a template produced cheaply, usually offshore, and for a lot of businesses it is the right purchase. If you need an address on the internet and your work comes from recommendation, spending three thousand pounds instead would be the mistake. What it will not do is get you found for the treatments you offer in your town, because the pages that would do that are not there.
Why does the same thing cost £349 in one place and £5,000 in another?
Because they are not the same thing. One is a theme with your name in it, produced at volume. The other is somebody spending days on the structure and the words for your specific business. Both are called a website, which is the whole confusion.
What should a clinic actually budget?
If you want to be found and followed up: somewhere between £300 and £800 a month with a UK agency, or a two to three thousand pound build plus hosting and someone to maintain it. Mine is £297 a month with no build fee, which sits below that band because there is no account manager, no office and no sales team in it.
How much of the price is the writing?
More than most people expect, and it is the part that decides whether the site works. A beautiful site with generic treatment copy will not rank and will not convince. That is the main reason a custom build costs what it does.
Is it cheaper to build it myself?
In money, yes, obviously. The cost is your time and the fact that most self-built clinic sites end up as a five-page brochure, because the structure that gets you found is the part that is genuinely hard rather than the part that looks hard.
Thirty minutes, and you will know if it is worth it.
No obligation, and nothing to pay to have the conversation.