Pricing
How much does a website cost in the UK?
A small business website in the UK ranges from about £50 hiring an offshore developer directly to several thousand pounds through a local agency. The spread is mostly labour cost by location and how many people sit between you and the person building it, not quality by definition.
What each band actually buys
| Band | Who | What you trade |
|---|---|---|
| £50–£200 | Direct offshore hire | One person’s judgement, at their cost of living. Diligence is on you |
| £300–£1,500 | UK freelancer | Same timezone and legal system, higher rate for similar output |
| £2,000–£8,000 | Small studio | Separate design, build and QA, plus someone to phone |
| £10,000+ | Agency | Account management, process, SLAs — a different market |
What actually moves the number
- Functionality, not page count — the twentieth page costs almost nothing once the first exists
- Integrations, each of which is a small project with its own failure modes
- Whether your content and photography exist, or somebody has to produce them
- How fast decisions come back, because a supplier holding context open is paying for it
The five line items to ask about
A quote can be technically honest and still surprise you. Ask explicitly whether payment integration, content population, post-launch fixes, hosting ownership and written handover are included, or quoted later once you are committed.
The longer version
This answer is deliberately short. If you want the full treatment, How much an e-commerce website actually costs, and what changes the number covers it in about 4 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.
Who answered this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. These answers come from those projects rather than from a content brief. More about how I work, or ask me something directly.