Why I moved UK Web Marketing to a monthly subscription

Until recently UK Web Marketing was a £1,599 fixed-fee build (£200 after the WEBSITE200 launch promo, which is what most clients actually paid). From today it’s a single £45-a-month subscription, with the first month free and cancel-any-time built in. Every other layer — care, hosting, updates, support — is bundled into that one number.

I wanted to be honest about why I changed it, because I know some of you saw the old price and bookmarked the page, and I owe you an explanation rather than just a quietly-updated CTA button.

The £200 offer was the wrong shape

The £200 build was always great value, but it had three problems I kept hitting:

1. It looked too cheap to be real. Half the conversations started with “what’s the catch?”. Nothing in the price was wrong — one-person op, no agency, hand-coded — but the gap between £200 and the £1,500–£3,000 every competitor was quoting created suspicion, not relief. A monthly takes the suspicion out: nobody blinks at £45.
2. The care plan was an awkward second decision. “£200 to build, then £25/month optional from month four” (the old model) sounded fair to me but forced clients into a second yes/no months after they’d already committed. Most picked the care plan; some didn’t, then later got in touch because their site needed an update they couldn’t make themselves. The natural state was “everything’s included” — the pricing now matches that.
3. It penalised continuity. A £200 one-off says “buy and forget”, but that’s not how a working website actually behaves — it needs occasional updates, security patches, copy tweaks. Tying the price to the relationship rather than the one-time build is honest about that.

How the maths works at £45 a month

The price isn’t a loss-leader. Three numbers do the heavy lifting:

• One person, no agency layers. No account manager, no project manager, no junior. I design, build and support every site personally. That cuts what a UK agency typically charges by roughly 70–80%. The price reflects what it actually costs to do the work — not what the market charges with five intermediaries in between.
• Hand-coded sites need almost no maintenance. A typical WordPress site needs 30+ plugin updates a year and breaks occasionally when they conflict. A hand-coded HTML/CSS/JavaScript site — like the one you’re reading this on — has almost zero ongoing dev work per year. Less time per site means lower sustainable price per site.
• Cloudflare’s UK edge hosting costs pennies. The same network that powers Shopify, Discord and Stripe serves your site for less than a coffee a month at this scale. Hosting is the cheap part now; pricing models that still treat it as a major cost line are basically charging for cost structures that haven’t existed for a decade.

Three numbers, three reasons, one price. If you want the quick version: see the pricing page.

What changes if you’re already a client

Nothing automatic. If you paid the £200 fee under the old model, you keep your site exactly as it was — same files, same domain, same hosting (if you took the care plan). I’m not going to retroactively put anyone on a subscription they didn’t choose.

If you’d like to move to the new model — for example you didn’t take the care plan and now want the bundled support — message me on WhatsApp and I’ll switch you over. There’s no penalty either way.

What changes if you’re new

You get the new offer:

• £45 a month, everything included — design, hand-coded build, fast UK-edge hosting, daily backups, security, updates, content tweaks, support.
• The first month is free in the sense that no money leaves your account. Stripe authorises your card at sign-up but charges £0.00 today. The first £45 lands when the free month ends. About a week before that, Stripe (and me) email you a heads-up.
• Cancel any time as a paying customer and I email you a zip of the site files — you take everything and host it wherever you like. Cancel during the free trial and the site comes down, no charge, no files (that’s how the trial stays sustainable for me to offer).

If that sounds like the shape you’ve been waiting for, the start page is two minutes and the first month doesn’t cost you anything.

A short note on the platform tools

The legacy site mentioned a “platform” — ordering for restaurants, bookings for clinics, stock for car dealers, ticketing for events. Those are still very much alive. Same builder (me), but they’re now sold and billed through my sister company TicketWave HQ instead of going on top of a UK Web Marketing invoice. UK Web Marketing handles your website; TicketWave HQ handles the operational tools. Two clean lines on your bank statement, one developer behind both.

If you want one of the platform tools alongside your UK Web Marketing site, say the word and I’ll wire the TicketWave HQ side up — the tools plugs into the site I’ve already built for you, so you don’t pay twice for the same plumbing.

That’s the change. Honest about why, honest about the maths, honest about what you get for the money. Any questions — WhatsApp me.