If you've spoken to a London agency lately, you'll have heard quotes of £3,000 to £8,000 upfront, plus a monthly retainer. We charge £45/month flat. Here's the honest breakdown of how that works.
The short answer: we charge less because our costs are lower, not because the work is worse.
Most UK web agencies are set up to deliver a small number of expensive, custom projects each year. They have offices in central London or Manchester, account managers, project managers, separate sales teams, and they price every project from scratch. That model has to charge thousands per build. There's no other way for the maths to work.
SteadyWeb is built differently. We focus on one specific job — lead-generating websites for UK tradespeople and local service businesses — and we've productised it down to the bone. The rest of this page explains exactly where the savings come from, and (just as importantly) where they don't.
Traditional agencies bill £3,000–£8,000 the day your site goes live and then disappear. They have to charge that much because they only get paid once.
We earn from you over years instead of weeks. That means we can put £0 setup on the front and recover the build cost gradually — as long as we keep doing good work and you stay. It aligns our incentives with yours: if your site stops bringing in leads, you cancel, and we lose. So we keep optimising.
We're registered in Bristol, not central London. We don't have a glass-fronted office in Shoreditch, a reception desk, a barista, or fifteen account managers. The team works remotely. Our overheads — rent, utilities, on-site staff — are a tiny fraction of a typical agency's.
Every pound an agency spends on premises has to come back from a client somewhere. We just don't have those pounds to recover.
The strategy, communication, account management, billing, monthly optimisation reports and final sign-off all happen in the UK. The hands-on production work — design, development, technical SEO and content drafting — is done by a small, dedicated team based in Pakistan that we've worked with for years and trained on our exact system.
It's not freelancers picked off a marketplace. It's the same people, every project, every month. They're not cheaper because they're worse — they're cheaper because the cost of living in Karachi is dramatically lower than in Bristol or London. The same person earning a comfortable senior salary there works for a fraction of what an equivalent UK developer would charge, and that saving goes straight into your monthly fee instead of into our margin.
Working with an overseas team only works if it's done properly under UK GDPR. We took this seriously from day one. Our overseas team operates as our processor under a written agreement, the UK International Data Transfer Agreement (IDTA), and a documented Transfer Risk Assessment.
What stays in the UK only:
What the production team can see (only what's needed to build the site):
Full safeguards, including the IDTA, sub-processor list and Transfer Risk Assessment, are documented in our Privacy Policy, Section 8. The matching contractual clause is in Terms, Section 13.5.
We don't do e-commerce. We don't do mobile apps, custom software, brand identity workshops, paid ads management as a primary service, or "digital strategy consulting". We build lead-generating websites for UK tradespeople and local service businesses. That's it.
Because we've done it hundreds of times, we have a refined system: page templates that convert, content frameworks that rank locally, a deployment process that gets a site live in 7 days, and a monthly optimisation routine that runs like clockwork. Specialisation is the single biggest cost-saver in any service business — and we've leaned into it harder than anyone in our space.
We don't run Google Ads. We don't have a sales team cold-calling tradespeople. We don't sponsor podcasts. The vast majority of our customers come from search results (because, well, we know how to rank a website) and from referrals from happy clients.
Most agencies spend £400–£1,200 to acquire each new client. That cost has to come back somewhere — usually from your bill. We just don't have it.
Hosting, SSL, backups, email and security are all things we buy in bulk and pass on at cost. A solo freelancer paying £20/month for a single VPS to host one client is paying ten times what we pay per site at scale.
Honest 2-minute assessment. We'll tell you if you don't need one — we'd rather be straight with you than sell you something you won't use.
Take the assessmentEvery site here was built using the lean model on this page. Same £45/month. Same UK-managed, remote-production setup.
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