The better question is what it should give back. A removals firm that wins one extra job a month from the site is in a different conversation from one that gets none, even if both paid the same.
Four routes, four different kinds of cost
A free template costs nothing and takes a weekend, plus evenings whenever something breaks. A freelancer costs a fixed fee and depends on them still answering emails next year. An agency costs the most up front and delivers the most tailored result.
A subscription spreads it into one monthly figure that includes the running. None of these is dishonest. They simply put the cost in different places, and the trick is knowing which place suits how you work.
Where the hidden costs actually sit
The domain renews every year. Hosting is monthly and priced by tiers most people cannot judge. Certificates lapse. Plugins need updating and occasionally break something else when they do. Changes cost either money or your evening.
And the largest hidden cost has no invoice at all: your own hours. An office cleaner who spends four evenings a year on a website has spent more than most subscriptions cost, in time that could have been billed or slept.
The cost of not being able to take a booking
Work out roughly what one job is worth to you. Now ask how many enquiries arrive outside the hours you can answer a phone, because evenings and Sunday afternoons are when people sort out their lives.
If even a couple of those turn into bookings each month, the arithmetic stops being about the subscription. A site that cannot accept work brings in nothing, which makes it the most expensive option on the list regardless of price.
What our monthly figure contains
Plans run from Lite at £49 to Start at £99, Plus at £149 and Pro at £199, all excluding VAT, with 20% off for paying yearly. There is no build fee and no setup charge.
Managed hosting is in every one of them: servers, monitoring, updates and security are ours, HTTPS certificates renew automatically, and backups run nightly with the restore tested nightly. Email support with real people is on every plan, never a paid tier. The only extras are prepaid SMS credits and AI credits, and you start with ten of those free.
When the cheapest route is genuinely right
If you are testing whether a business idea works at all, spend nothing and put a single page up. If every job you get comes from one contractor who already has your number, a website is not your bottleneck.
And if you do want a site but only need it to be found and read, stay on Lite rather than paying for a calendar and campaigns you will never open. We would rather have you on the right plan than the larger one.