A UK agency will typically quote somewhere between £5,000 and £15,000 for a proper business website. Our packages start at £359. People reasonably ask what has been left out, so this post explains where the money goes on a traditional project and which parts of that work AI now does for us.
Where an agency budget goes
Pay an agency £10,000 and only a slice of it buys the website itself. The rest covers the people and the building around it. A rough split looks like this:
Project management and meetings take a fifth to a third of it. Senior developers at £75 to £150 an hour spend a good share of their time on work that is now largely automated. Juniors handle the repetitive layout and browser fixes. Design goes back and forth between a design tool and code. Then the agency adds its margin, which pays for the office, the sales team and everyone who doesn't bill hours.
What AI changes in the build
We haven't simply bolted AI tools onto the old process. We rebuilt the process so that AI does the predictable, repetitive work and a person makes the decisions.
Planning
Turning a brief into a page plan, a list of components and a content outline used to take days of documents. Now it takes a working session, and a person checks the result against what the client actually said.
The design system
From a brand brief we produce colours, type sizes, spacing and the basic components as working CSS. A designer then adjusts it, because a generated palette is a starting point and not a finished brand.
Building the pages
Headers, cards, forms and footers come out of the AI as a first draft. A developer reviews each one, fixes what's wrong and fits it into the site. Most of the typing is done by the machine. The judgement is still ours.
Search basics
Page titles, descriptions, structured data and the sitemap are produced from the content plan, so they are never forgotten at launch.
Testing
Accessibility, speed and layout checks run automatically every time the site changes, so problems turn up before the client sees them.
What you end up with
Take out the meetings, the repetition and most of the overhead, and the remaining cost is mainly skilled review. Every site we deliver is built to the same standard:
- fast on a phone, with a target PageSpeed score of 90 or above
- static pages with no database or plugins to attack
- built and tested against WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility guidelines
- a design made for the business rather than a template with the logo swapped
- an AI assistant so you can update your own content
What it means for you
You get a site that would have cost several thousand pounds from a traditional agency for between £359 and £1,439. You own the code and the design. You can make day-to-day changes yourself through the assistant. And there is no retainer for "maintenance" that turns out to be plugin updates.
Agencies are not overcharging for the work they do. The work itself has changed, and our pricing reflects that.
See what £359 buys
Every package is built the same way, and the prices are fixed before we start.
View Our Packages →Daedalus Design builds professional websites with AI assistants for UK businesses, and writes about where automation is actually useful in web design.