Pay monthly websites, built and run for one flat fee.

What pay monthly actually means

Three different products get sold under the same two words, and the difference decides whether the price is fair.

The first is a builder subscription. Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy. You pay around £20 a month for software and hosting, and you do all of the work: the layout, the copy, the images, the SEO settings, every later change. Nobody is on the other end.

The second is a financed build. A studio quotes £2,400, splits it across 24 or 36 months, and calls it £100 a month. It is a payment plan with a website attached. Read what happens in month 37: sometimes the fee drops away, sometimes it quietly continues for a service that has stopped.

The third is a managed service, which is what we sell. One fee covers the build and the running of it: hosting, domain, SSL, email forwarding, the monthly edits, the Google Business Profile upkeep and the on-page SEO. There is no separate maintenance contract and no per-edit invoice. The fee is not a loan against the build. It is the price of someone continuing to look after the thing.

All three are legitimate. They are not interchangeable, and comparing a £19 headline with a £79 one without asking which of the three you are buying is how owners end up disappointed. What we include, in detail.

What is included at each tier

Every tier includes the build itself, the hosting on Cloudflare, HTTPS, the domain, email forwarding for that domain, and the ongoing work below. £0 setup on all three. Pay a year up front and take 10% off, which is £529 a year on Essentials, £853 on Growth and £2160 on Pro. No VAT, because we sit below the threshold.

Essentials, £49 a month

A three to six page site that needs to be up, fast and quietly maintained. Up to two content edits a month, done inside about two working days. Google Business Profile maintenance and the on-page SEO basics. A quarterly health check on speed, accessibility and broken links.

Growth, £79 a month

Everything in Essentials, plus up to four content edits a month turned around next working day, up to ten cornerstone pages, one blog post a month written by us with your input, and local pages for the towns where you have real work to point at, written one at a time rather than generated in bulk. A quarterly review call to plan the next three months.

Pro, £200 a month

Everything in Growth, plus four blog posts a month, up to eight edits a month on same-working-day priority, a monthly performance report, and enquiry and booking capture set up and maintained for you. Full pricing and the tier-by-tier comparison.

What the cheap tiers leave out

Headline prices in this category start at around £19 a month in the offers we see across the UK market in 2026: an observed price, not a published statistic. That number is real. It is also doing a lot of hiding. Five questions separate a £19 offer from a £49 one, and every provider should answer all five in a single email.

• Who is the domain registered to? If it is in the provider's name and you leave, you are negotiating for your own address. Ours goes in your business name on day one.
• What counts as an edit, and how many? Plenty of cheap plans include zero, or include "minor text changes" without defining minor. Ours are two, four or eight a month by tier, with a named turnaround in working days.
• Is hosting genuinely included, and for how long? Some entry tiers include hosting for twelve months, then add a separate bill. Ours is included for as long as you are a client, with no separate hosting invoice ever.
• What happens on the day you cancel? The honest answer is a list of files and a date. The evasive answer is a paragraph about transition support.
• Who answers when you email? On a £19 plan it is usually a ticket queue. Here it is the person who built the site, and that stays true at every tier.

None of that makes the cheap plans a scam. It makes them a different product. If you want software and you will do the work, £19 is a good deal. If you want the work done, £19 was never going to buy it.

The five-year cost, next to a £3,000 one-off build

The comparison that matters is not month one, it is year five, with the hosting bills, the domain renewals and the "can you just add a page" emails counted in.

Two things in that table are worth saying out loud. Pro at £200 a month reaches the same £12,000 as a one-off build plus a retainer, so at that level you are choosing on what the work is, not on the price. And the £4,900 row is the cheapest maintained-by-nobody option: the site is five years old, the plugins are five years old, and the enquiries have usually drifted somewhere else. The full five-year maths, with the change-request costs.

Who owns the site and the domain

You do. Ownership is not one thing though, so here is each part named separately, which is what a fair contract should do.

• The domain. Registered in your business name from day one. Check the record yourself. It never sits in ours.
• The content. Your copy, your photos, your brand assets. Yours, including the words we write for you.
• The site source. Real HTML, CSS and templates, not a proprietary builder database. We hand it over as a folder of files.
• The analytics. Accounts in your name, with us added as a user, not the other way round.
• The DNS. You hold the registrar login. We ask for access, not for ownership.

While you are a client we license back to ourselves only what we need to keep the site running, and that licence ends when you cancel. If a pay-monthly provider cannot answer those five points in one short email, that is the answer.

What happens if you cancel

Send one email. There is no notice period, no cancellation fee, no retention call and no form asking why. The billing stops at the end of the month you are in.

Inside the first 30 days the money-back guarantee applies: we refund the months you have paid, and you still keep the domain and the files. After day 30 the same cancellation terms apply, minus the refund.

Within seven working days of cancelling you get a working copy of the whole site: source files, content, images and the configuration. Because it is a static site, it will run on any host, including the free tiers, and it does not need us or our accounts to work. We will help you point the domain wherever you are going. The honest limitation: from that day nobody is patching, editing or watching the site unless you arrange it, and the small local-SEO work stops. What you lose by leaving is the service, not the asset.

Who pay monthly is not right for

This model suits a lot of owner-run businesses and it genuinely does not suit some. The ones below are better served elsewhere, and we would rather say so now than in month three.

• You need a checkout. If you sell products online with a cart, stock levels and shipping rules, use Shopify. We do not build e-commerce and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
• Your site is genuinely finished. A brochure site that will not change for three years, run by someone in-house who handles hosting and backups without you noticing, is cheaper as a one-off. Pay once, walk away, and do not pay us £49 a month to watch it sit there.
• You need software, not a website. Member logins, patient portals, booking engines with live availability, dashboards, anything with accounts and state. That is an application. It needs a different budget and a different sort of firm.
• You want ads, social or brand design bundled in. We do not run paid media, we do not manage social accounts and we do not design logos. If those are the priority, the monthly fee is not buying what you need.
• You will not reply to emails. The edits are included, but we cannot invent your new opening hours. If nobody in the business will spend ten minutes a month telling us what changed, the site goes stale and the fee stops earning.
• You want a large bespoke design programme. If you want art direction, custom illustration and a design system built from scratch, hire a studio at studio rates. Our work is fast, clean and conventional on purpose.

Where it does fit: hospitality, professional services, ambitious trades, independent retail and small practices, where the site brings in enquiries and changes often enough that per-edit billing becomes annoying. A worked example of the model in practice: Sameday Jetwash, a pressure-washing business we run ourselves, with its unedited Search Console data published. For a client on the monthly arrangement from the start, the Dirty South Power Wash case study covers a Horley pressure-washing firm that moved off a nine-page builder site onto 90 pages, and publishes its first month: 10,854 impressions and 13 clicks.

How to start

Send us what you are trying to do, in a paragraph. We reply with whether we are the right fit and which tier we would put you on, before any call. If it looks right, we book a 30-minute brief.

Inside two working days of that brief you have a draft to look at. We revise it once or twice, then it goes live on your domain, usually about a week from the first email. Billing starts when the site is live, not when you enquire. The 30-day guarantee runs from that first payment.

We are based in East Dulwich, London, and we work with businesses across the UK. Same price everywhere. The areas we cover in person are on our London and Surrey pages. Tell us what you need.