Update — June 2026: The single £45/month tier has since evolved into a three-tier ladder: Foundation (£45/mo, the original — site + technical SEO + EU-sovereign hosting + email forwarding), Growth Engine (£195/mo — Foundation + lead-gen + newsletter + Capsule CRM + 2 articles/mo), Bespoke (quoted — Growth Engine + TicketWave HQ Bookings integration + boutique support + bespoke retainers). The article below explains the original move from £200 fixed-fee → £45/mo; everything in it still holds for Foundation. Compare the three tiers on /pricing, or read the EU-sovereign compliance posture if you’re in a regulated vertical (clinics / solicitors / schools / accountants).

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). The first transition was to a single £45-a-month subscription with cancel-any-time built in. Every other layer — care, hosting, updates, support — bundled into that one number. (Since then the model has evolved into three tiers — see the note above; the original single-tier reasoning below still applies to Foundation specifically.)

I owe an honest explanation for why I changed it, because I know some of you saw the old price and bookmarked the page. A quietly-updated CTA button isn’t enough.

The £200 offer was the wrong shape

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

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.
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.
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.
Vercel London (lhr1) hosting costs pennies. The same edge network that powers Linear, Notion, and Loom 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 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/month Foundation tier — design, hand-coded Astro build, Vercel London hosting, daily backups, security, updates, content tweaks, support.
Billed from day one. Stripe charges £45 the day you start the subscription and on the same day every month after, until you cancel. Statutory 14-day cancellation right applies under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 — full refund if you cancel before any work begins.
Cancel any time after 12 paid months and the site files come to you — you take everything and host it wherever you like. Cancel before then and the site comes down (you keep your domain + anything you brought). That’s how the £45/mo model stays sustainable.

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 original change. Honest about why, honest about the maths, honest about what you get for the money.

Why Foundation grew into three tiers

The £45/mo Foundation model worked. Clients signed up, sites went live, the maths held. But two patterns emerged in the months that followed:

Some clients wanted more than a site. They wanted lead-gen on top — newsletters, CRMs, monthly content articles to rank for new terms. I was doing this work informally on top of the £45, which wasn’t sustainable. Growth Engine (£195/mo) is the formal answer: everything in Foundation, plus structured lead-gen + monthly content + conversion-rate optimisation. Still anchors below an agency retainer; the operational logic still holds.
Some clients ran proper operations. Clinics taking bookings, restaurants taking orders, schools running open-day signups. They needed the TicketWave HQ modules wired into the site, plus boutique-grade support around the lot. Bespoke (quoted) covers that integration + same-day support SLA + branded analytics + deeper content. The TWHQ module itself bills separately at TWHQ’s per-module pricing — UK Web Marketing handles the integration, TWHQ handles the engine.

Foundation didn’t go away. It’s still the cheap acquisition layer for the £45 prospect. The ladder is what serious customers grow into — without ever paying agency prices to do it.

EU-sovereign as the differentiator

The other shift, in parallel: all three tiers run on EU-sovereign infrastructure. Vercel London (lhr1), Cloudflare EU/UK edges, Resend EU for outbound email, Capsule CRM (Manchester-based), Stripe Payments Europe (Ireland EU entity for UK merchants). No client data on US-resident SaaS subject to the US CLOUD Act. For most UK SMBs that’s a footnote. For UK clinics, solicitors, schools, and accountants — the Tier 1 regulated verticals — it’s the whole point.

Any questions about which tier fits — WhatsApp me or compare the three honest tiers.

The Three-Tier Ladder (a quoted framework)

The current model — embed-friendly, attribution to UK Web Marketing appreciated, not required:

Tier	Price/mo	What’s in it
Foundation	£45	Hand-coded Astro site + EU-sovereign hosting (Vercel London lhr1) + tech SEO + Cloudflare Email Routing + WhatsApp support + cancel any time
Growth Engine	£195	Foundation + Capsule CRM + Resend EU newsletter + 2 SEO articles/mo + quarterly CRO review + lead magnets
Bespoke	Quoted	Growth Engine + TicketWave HQ Bookings integration + same-day support SLA + 4 articles/mo + quarterly strategy reviews + bespoke retainers

Three honest tiers, monthly subscription, EU-sovereign infrastructure at every level. Foundation is the acquisition layer; Growth Engine is the lead-gen engine; Bespoke is the operational integration tier for clinics / solicitors / schools / accountants running active practice operations.

Cite this article: Jordan Gilbert, “Why I moved UK Web Marketing to a monthly subscription”, UK Web Marketing, 27 May 2026. https://ukwebmarketing.com/blog/why-monthly-subscription

Why I moved UK Web Marketing to a monthly subscription