In the age of AI, what should a website actually cost?

Let's have the awkward conversation first.

You can open ChatGPT tonight, describe your joinery business, and have a website by the time the kettle's boiled. It'll look decent. It'll have your services on it. It might even have a contact form.

So why would you pay anybody a penny?

It's a fair question, and most web companies won't go near it. We will, because we use AI every day and it's changed what we charge.

What AI genuinely did change

It made the building part cheap.

Writing the code for a small business website used to be days of work. Now a lot of it is minutes. Anyone telling you a five-page site is £2,500 because of "development time" is quoting you 2019 prices for 2026 work.

That's real, and you should benefit from it. It's the reason we can charge £39 a month instead of a few thousand up front. We're not being generous — the work genuinely got faster, and pretending otherwise would be taking the mickey.

So if someone quotes you thousands for a simple brochure site, ask what exactly is taking so long.

What AI didn't change

Here's the bit that doesn't show up in the demo.

AI builds what you ask for. It doesn't tell you what to ask for.

Ask it for a website and you'll get a website. What you won't get:

• Anyone noticing your phone number isn't tappable on a phone, which is how roughly every one of your customers will try to ring you
• Anyone telling you the page takes six seconds to load, and that Google quietly buries slow sites
• Anyone pointing out that "joiner Perth" is worth more to you than "bespoke joinery solutions", because that's what people type
• Anyone setting up your Google Business Profile — which, for a local trade, brings in more work than the website does
• Anyone checking it still works in eight months when something breaks

None of that is code. It's knowing what matters, and it's the difference between a website that exists and a website that gets you phoned.

The thing nobody mentions

The average AI-built site looks great and does nothing.

It sits there. It doesn't rank, because nobody told it to. It's slow, because nobody measured. It's got a contact form that quietly stopped emailing three months ago and nobody noticed, because nobody was looking.

A website that nobody finds is a very tidy way of spending an evening.

So what should it cost?

Our honest answer, as of 2026:

• A simple site for a sole trader: a few hundred pounds, or a small monthly fee. Not thousands. If you're quoted thousands for five pages, get another quote.
• Anything with real functionality — booking, scheduling, payments — costs more, because that part hasn't got dramatically cheaper.
• Somebody keeping an eye on it is worth paying for, and it should be a small monthly amount, not a retainer with a fancy name.

We publish our prices in full, which almost nobody local does. You can look at them right now without ringing anyone or sitting through a sales call.

The honest version

Should you use AI to build your own website?

If you're comfortable with computers, you've got a spare weekend, and the site is mostly there to look legitimate when somebody Googles you after a recommendation — genuinely, give it a go. You'll get something serviceable, and we'd rather tell you that than take your money.

Pay someone when you want the website to actually bring you work. That's a different job, and it's mostly not the building.

The code got cheap. The judgement didn't.