Try to find a web design price on a Surrey agency's website. Go on, I'll wait. You'll find "get in touch for a quote", a contact form, and a sales call before anyone will say a number out loud.
I think that's daft, so here are mine. These are my real starting prices, the same ones on my services page, with an honest account of what each level buys and who it's for. Where I talk about agency pricing, that's from quotes my clients have shown me, so take the exact figures as Surrey market shape rather than gospel.
First, who this is for. These are prices for businesses investing in a site that brings customers in: established trades, salons, clinics, cafés, firms. If you're pre-revenue and need something live for £100, that's what my templates are for, and they're good. This post is about proper builds.
Up to five pages, custom designed, built by hand, fast. Home, services, about, contact, and one more. No template underneath, no page builder, no monthly platform fee.
What that buys at this level: a site that loads in under a second, scores 90+ on Google's mobile speed test, ranks properly for your name and has a fair shot at your local search terms, and is completely yours. Files, domain, the lot.
Who it's for: businesses whose site needs to answer three questions fast. What do you do, can I trust you, how do I contact you. A plasterer in Leatherhead or a physio in Reigate rarely needs more, and paying for more anyway is how web budgets die.
Everything above, plus a dashboard where you edit the site yourself. Change prices, swap photos, publish news, add pages. No developer, no per-change invoice, no waiting.
This is the right level for businesses whose content moves: menus, class schedules, project galleries, a blog that feeds Google fresh pages. Over three years, self-editing typically saves more than the price gap, because agencies charge £60–£90 an hour for content changes and the average "quick update" bill I've seen is £120.
It's also the natural landing spot for businesses leaving Wix or Squarespace: you keep the edit-it-yourself convenience and lose the rent, the lock-in and the slow engine.
A proper shop: products, payments, delivery options, order management. Built on Shopify or WooCommerce depending on what you're selling and how, which is a longer conversation than a price list should hold.
The honest caveat: e-commerce is where scope grows fastest. Fifty products with simple postage is nothing like five hundred products with variants and click-and-collect. Which is why the next section matters more than any of the numbers so far.
Booking systems, client portals, member areas, dashboards. Software, in other words, wearing your branding. If your business runs on a process that off-the-shelf tools don't fit, this is that.
Since these are floors, it's fair to say what pushes a project above them. In practice it's nearly always one of four things:
What never moves the price: asking questions, changing your mind about a colour, or the build taking me longer than I guessed. That last one is the point of fixed pricing.
Every price above is a floor, not a bracket. I don't publish ceilings, and here's the reason: a printed range like "£900–£2,500" is really a promise that your quote will be £2,500. You've seen this with builders' estimates. The top of the range does gravitational work.
Instead, you describe the project, I scope it, and you get one fixed number. If the work takes me longer than I guessed, that's my problem, not a change order. The quote is priced to your project's actual scope, which is the only honest way I know to price custom work.
For calibration, from quotes clients have shown me: Guildford and Woking agencies commonly land between £3,000 and £8,000 for a brochure-level site, and £10,000+ isn't rare once meetings and "discovery workshops" are priced in. You're part-funding an office on the High Street and an account manager between you and the developer.
Freelancers across Surrey mostly quote £800–£3,000 for comparable work. Cheaper than me exists too. When a quote comes in at £300, the questions in choosing a web designer in Surrey will show you where the cost went; it went somewhere.
I've also broken down the national picture, DIY builders included, if you want the full market rather than my corner of it.
Not "what do websites cost", but "what would my project cost". That one's free: describe the project in a couple of minutes and I'll come back within 24 hours with a fixed price and an honest opinion, including "you don't need the expensive version" when you don't. Ask my clients; that sentence comes up a lot.
Federica is a web designer in Surrey. She builds fast, fixed-price websites that clients own outright, and writes about it here. More about her
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