A site that cannot take a booking at nine on a Sunday evening earns nothing that evening, and the caller rings the next name on the list. The price you paid was low. The price you paid plus the job you lost was not.
Wanting a cheap website is the right instinct
Nobody running a hair salon or a two-van cleaning company wants to hand over a month of takings before the site has produced a single job. Starting carefully is how careful people start, and we would rather you did that than sign up for something large you cannot judge yet.
So we will not argue you out of it. We will show you where the cost tends to reappear, because it rarely disappears, and let you decide whether it matters for your trade.
What the low price usually leaves out
The advertised figure is often just the template. The domain is separate. Somewhere to host it is separate. A certificate, so the padlock shows in the address bar, is free until the renewal nobody remembers.
Then comes the part that costs most and appears on no invoice: taking work in. A page with a phone number on it is a poster. Outside the hours you can answer, it is a photograph of your business, and photographs do not book anybody in.
Your own hours are the most expensive thing you own
A free template plus a weekend of your time is not free. Add three evenings a year keeping it upright, one more when an update quietly breaks the contact form, and an afternoon spent working out why the menu sits on top of the logo on a phone.
A carpenter who bills for a day has paid for a year of almost anything in hours nobody invoiced. Do that sum before comparing monthly prices, and ask what the site should give back rather than only what it takes.
Cheap hosting is where the hidden bill hides
Managed hosting comes with every plan, and the word is not decoration. We run the servers and watch them, so you own no server and install nothing. HTTPS certificates are issued and renewed for you, which is why the padlock stays where visitors expect it.
Backups run every night and the restore is tested every night, because a backup nobody has read back is a hope rather than a safeguard. Updates and security holes are our job: no plugins to keep in step, no versions to track.
When the cheapest plan really is the right one
Sometimes the honest answer is that you do not need much. A massage therapist with a full book and a waiting list, whose new clients all arrive by recommendation, has no use for discount codes or a staff rota.
That is what Lite is for, at £49 a month: a real website with hosting, HTTPS, nightly backups, your own domain, opening hours, an FAQ, reviews and a clean booking request form. If that covers you, take it. Moving up later rebuilds nothing.