There are three common ways to get a small business website built, and the gap between them is wide. Most of it comes down to overheads, not the quality of the site itself. Here is what each route really costs, and what you get for the money.
Three routes, very different prices
DIY builder
Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy
£10 to £35/mo
Ongoing subscription
Cheap to start, but it takes real time to build well, and the site disappears if you stop paying.
Full-service agency
Teams in Southampton or Winchester
£5k to £15k+
Plus VAT
Great for big, ongoing brand projects. The office and team overheads sit in the price, so it is usually more than a small local business needs.
Fixels
Based in Chandler's Ford
From £29/mo
Plus a £99 setup fee
Purpose-built for small local businesses. One fixed price, a fast static build, and you own the code and the domain.
What each route costs over three years
Monthly fees add up, so it helps to look further ahead than the first bill. Over three years, a Fixels Standard Site costs more than the pricier DIY plans, but we build it, write it and look after it for you. An agency build costs several times more before you have paid for any hosting.
| Route | Cost over three years | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| DIY website builder | £360 to £1,260 | £10 to £35 a month, plus your own time |
| Fixels Standard Site | £1,863 | £49 a month after a £99 setup fee, done for you |
| Full-service agency | £5,000 to £15,000+ | The build alone, before any hosting or upkeep |
Why the gap is so wide
Most of the price gap comes down to overheads. Larger agencies run physical studios, account managers, project managers, and separate design and development teams. Useful on a £50k brand project. Hard to justify on a five-page site for a local plumber.
We work as a small team in Chandler's Ford, with very little overhead. The saving doesn't come from cutting corners on the build, it comes from not paying for things you don't need.
What you're paying for under the bonnet
A lot of cheaper builders ship a generic, off-the-shelf template. It works, but it's usually slow on a phone and harder to keep fast and secure over time.
We use a modern build pipeline that pre-renders your pages as static HTML and serves them from a Content Delivery Network (CDN). The page arrives on a customer's phone in well under a second on a normal connection.
Page speed is one of Google's ranking signals, particularly on mobile. It won't outrank an established competitor on its own, but a slow site will actively hold you back.
The running costs to know about
The build is a one-off fee. Beyond that, there are just two small running costs:
Domain name
Your web address (a .co.uk, say). Typically £8 to £15 a year, direct from a registrar.
Hosting
Where the site lives. Every site includes our Hosting & Maintenance plan from £29 a month, covering hosting, uptime, and up to 30 minutes of small edits a month.
We register the domain in your own name with no markup, so you have full control of it from day one. You also keep ownership of the code we build for you outright. Want to see what you get for the money? Have a look at sites we have built, or our full prices.