Last Updated on June 12, 2026
Original Whito research: every published price we could find from UK marketing providers, collected and analysed
Executive Summary
Ask Google what a small business website costs and you will be told £3,000 to £6,000. Ask the UK providers who actually publish their prices and the median is £520. Both numbers are real. They describe two different markets, and almost nobody tells business owners which one they are shopping in.
This study does something the cost guides do not. Instead of quoting other articles, we collected every published price we could find from UK web design, SEO, PPC and social media providers in June 2026: 128 individual prices from 47 providers, taken directly from their own pricing pages. We then put those numbers next to the major UK freelance rate surveys and what small businesses say they actually budget.
Key Findings
- The published-price market is far cheaper than the quoted-price market. Providers who publish prices cluster at £299 to £999 for a brochure website, while mid-market agencies quoting £3,000 plus almost never publish a number. Price transparency and price level move together.
- SEO retainers stratify into three clear bands: budget operators at £99 to £300 a month, mainstream small business providers at £350 to £1,000, and established agencies starting at £1,500 and running past £5,000. The median published SEO price across all 45 data points is £799 a month.
- Freelancers price 30 to 50% below agencies for comparable scope, in every category we measured.
- PPC management is now priced almost exclusively by ad spend band in the published market. The median published fee is £470 a month, and percentage-of-spend deals are essentially never published.
- Social media management is a barbell: productised plans at £50 to £350 a month on one side, strategy-led retainers from £500 to £1,500 plus on the other, with very little in between.
- There is a structural gap between budgets and prices. Most UK small businesses budget under £250 a month for all marketing, while the median published price of a single managed channel is £358 to £799. That gap, not a lack of effort, explains most disappointing results.
Contents
The Transparency Gap
The most useful finding in this study is not a price. It is a pattern about who publishes prices at all.
Across all four categories, the providers willing to put a number on their website are overwhelmingly the cheaper ones: productised services, regional studios, freelancers and volume operators. Mid-market and premium agencies almost universally hide pricing behind a contact form. Several say so openly on their own packages pages.
This has a practical consequence for any business owner doing research. Every “how much does X cost” guide is describing the quoted market, where prices are negotiated and start around £1,000 a month. Every pricing page you can actually find is describing the published market, where prices start around £100. Comparing a £99 published package against a £1,500 quote is not comparing like with like. They are different products sold to different buyers.
Websites: What Published Prices Say
We collected 33 published website prices from 19 UK providers, from Glasgow to Cornwall. They split into three distinct products.
| Market segment | Published price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Pay-monthly subscription | £19 to £145/month | Template-based site, hosting included, 12 to 24 month term, ownership usually transfers after the term |
| Fixed-fee budget build | £299 to £999 one-off | 5 to 12 page brochure site, often bundling domain, a year of hosting and basic SEO |
| Freelancer custom build | £500 to £2,500 one-off | Customised or from-scratch design, direct relationship with the builder |
| Regional agency (quoted market) | £3,000 to £6,000 one-off | Bespoke design, copywriting support, project management. Rarely published, typically quoted |
Whito analysis of 33 published prices, June 2026. Across the 28 one-off builds: cheapest £299, median £520, upper quartile £898.
Two warnings hide inside the cheap end. First, several budget builders pair a low headline price with a mandatory monthly care fee of £25 to £30, which roughly doubles the two-year cost of a £299 site. Second, VAT treatment is inconsistent across the market: some prices include it, some add 20%, and many pages do not say. Always ask.
The pay-monthly model deserves more attention than it gets. At £19 to £44 a month with hosting included, it is now the cheapest professional route online for a new business, provided you check who owns the site if you stop paying.
SEO Retainers
SEO produced our largest sample: 45 published monthly prices from 16 providers. The structure of the market is remarkably consistent. Almost every provider sells three tiers, and each tier costs roughly 1.7 to 2 times the one below it.
| Band | Monthly price | Who sells it |
|---|---|---|
| Budget | £99 to £300 | Volume operators and productised packages. Defined task lists, little strategy |
| Mainstream small business | £350 to £1,000 | Regional agencies and specialist freelancers. The realistic floor for proper local SEO |
| Established agency | £1,500 to £5,000+ | Award-winning and national agencies. Most publish ranges rather than fixed prices, or nothing at all |
Whito analysis of 45 published prices, June 2026. Median entry tier £447. Median across all published prices £799. Median top tier £1,500.
Freelancers and sole traders consistently undercut agencies by 30 to 50% for similar scope, and one structural reason is easy to miss: sole traders below the VAT threshold charge no VAT, an automatic 20% advantage over a VAT-registered agency.
Where providers split local from national work, national SEO costs 1.5 to 2 times the local price. One 2026 wrinkle worth knowing: nearly every pricing page now bundles AI search visibility (ChatGPT, AI Overviews) into standard packages at no extra charge. If a provider quotes it as a paid add-on, that is now against the market.
For what agencies charge across all services on retainer, see our UK agency retainer research, and our dedicated UK SEO pricing study digs deeper into this market. For channel-by-channel reference ranges that include the quoted market, the UK Marketing Cost Index is the companion page to this study.
PPC Management
The published PPC market has settled on one dominant model: a flat monthly fee banded by your ad spend. A typical ladder runs £275 a month to manage up to £1,000 of spend, £385 up to £2,000, £495 up to £4,000, and £660 up to £6,000.
| Measure | Published monthly fee |
|---|---|
| Cheapest published | £145 |
| Lower quartile | £280 |
| Median | £470 |
| Upper quartile | £829 |
| Highest published | £2,150 |
Whito analysis of 24 published prices from 9 UK providers, June 2026. Fees exclude ad spend in all but one case.
Percentage-of-spend pricing, the model most cost guides lead with, is essentially invisible in the published market. Agencies that charge 10 to 20% of spend are quote-only. London anchors the expensive end: published London fees rarely start below £600, while remote and regional specialists publish from £145.
Management fees are only half the PPC bill. What the clicks themselves cost in the UK is covered in our UK Google Ads cost data.
Social media management has split into two markets that barely overlap, and the published prices show it clearly.
The cheap side is productised: fixed posts per week on a fixed number of platforms, cancel any time, from £50 to £350 a month. The providers are deliberately based outside London, in County Durham, the Isle of Wight and Greater Manchester, and they compete on price and process.
The expensive side sells strategy: content creation, community management, reporting and a named account manager, from roughly £500 to £1,500 plus, usually on 3 to 12 month terms. Video is the dividing line. Plans that include Reels or TikTok production start around £199 to £365 and climb fast.
The honest question before buying either: do you need someone to keep your channels alive (buy the cheap side), or do you need social to produce revenue (budget for the expensive side, or do not bother). The £200 middle ground mostly buys disappointment.
Freelance Day Rates
Packages tell you what providers sell. Day rates tell you what the underlying labour costs. The three major UK surveys agree with each other to a striking degree.
Sources: ProCopywriters Survey 2025 (474 respondents, average £480/day, up 9% on the year); Major Players Creative Industries Census 2025 (4,140 respondents); YunoJuno 2026 Rates Report (platform booking data). Day rates are averages, not minimums.
These rates are the sanity check for every retainer above. A £300 a month SEO package buys roughly one day of a competent freelancer’s time. That is enough to maintain a Google Business Profile and fix obvious issues. It is not enough to write content, build links and do technical work, whatever the package page promises. When a price looks too good against the day rate, the hours are coming from somewhere: junior staff, automation, or simply not doing the work.
The Budget Gap
Now put the two halves of this study together. According to the SME Marketing Report 2025, 58% of UK small businesses spend less than £250 a month on marketing in total. The median published price of one managed channel is £358 to £799 a month. Most UK small businesses cannot afford the median price of a single professionally managed channel, let alone three.
This is the quiet structural fact underneath most marketing disappointment. The typical small business budget buys one of three things: the owner’s own time plus good tools, one budget-tier package, or a slice of a freelancer. It does not buy an agency relationship, and pretending otherwise is how £250 a month gets spread across five channels and vanishes.
The data points to a clear order of operations. Fix the free and cheap foundations first: a working website, a complete Google Business Profile, reviews. Then fund one channel at its realistic price rather than several at token prices. What that total budget should be for your size of business is covered in our UK marketing budget benchmarks.
Budget Calculator: What Should You Expect to Pay?
Based on the published prices in this study. Tick the services you are considering, pick the kind of provider, and the calculator shows the realistic range before VAT.
Ranges built from the quartiles in this study, June 2026. Excludes VAT and ad spend. A quote outside these ranges is not automatically wrong, but it deserves a question.
How to Use These Numbers
- Match the market to your budget. Under £500 a month total, shop the published-price market and expect defined deliverables. Over £1,000 a month for one channel, you are in the quoted market, so get three quotes and compare scope, not just price.
- Use day rates to test quotes. Divide any retainer by the relevant day rate. If a £500 package implies more than a day and a half of skilled work each month, ask who is actually doing it.
- Always confirm VAT and total cost of ownership. The two most common surprises in our data were unstated VAT and mandatory monthly care fees attached to cheap website builds.
Methodology
Whito collected 128 individual prices from 47 UK marketing providers in June 2026, covering web design (19 providers), SEO (16), PPC management (9) and social media management (11). Every price was taken directly from the provider’s own published pricing or packages page. Prices from third-party cost guides were excluded. Where a provider published a range rather than a fixed price, the midpoint was recorded and is flagged in the dataset. Templated multi-city networks publishing identical prices under different city names were counted once. Published prices skew towards the budget end of the market because mid-market and premium providers typically do not publish pricing; this bias is discussed openly in the analysis rather than corrected for. VAT treatment varies by provider and is noted where stated. Day rate figures come from the ProCopywriters Survey 2025, the Major Players Creative Industries Census 2025 and the YunoJuno 2026 Rates Report. The small business budget figure comes from the SME Marketing Report 2025. The full provider-level dataset, including every price and source URL, is available on request via our contact page, and this page is free to cite with a link to Whito.
What to Do Next
Before you sign anything, check the quote against the band it should sit in above, then cross-reference the channel in the UK Marketing Cost Index. If you are setting next quarter’s budget rather than buying a single service, start with our UK marketing budget benchmarks, and if paid search is on the list, see what UK clicks actually cost in our Google Ads cost data.
