There’s an ad that keeps showing up. Social media, inboxes, local business networking evenings. The wording changes but the pitch is always the same: get a website in 7 days, free setup, no upfront cost. Just sign up.
If you’re a sole trader trying to keep costs down, that sounds like a no-brainer. Why spend £2,499 on a website when someone’s offering you one for nothing?
Here’s the bit they leave out.
What you’re actually signing up for
These aren’t charities. They’re subscription products. No upfront cost means the money comes later, every month, for as long as you stay. I’ve seen these packages priced at £25 a month at the cheap end, £50 in the middle, and over £150 a month for the ones that bundle in marketing tools you’ll probably never touch.
Run that across two years: you’re spending £600, £1,200, or £3,600. For a website that wasn’t designed around your business, that you don’t own, and that gets harder to walk away from the longer you stay.
That’s not a saving. That’s a slow bleed.
The template problem
These websites are almost always built from generic templates. Same layout, same stock photography, same structure as every other business in your category who went with the same provider. The only part that changes is your logo and whatever words someone dropped in at setup.
Your website isn’t supposed to look like everyone else’s. It’s supposed to say why someone should call you over the five other people they’ve just Googled. A template built for “service businesses” isn’t built around what you actually do, who you serve, or why someone should pick you over anyone else.
Design without strategy is just decoration. A website built for everyone is built for no one.
The update trap
Because the site wasn’t built for independence, it’s often a nightmare to update. The CMS is clunky, the structure’s locked down, or the people who sold it to you are the same people you’d have to call every time you want to change a word. So you don’t. You put it off. You tell yourself you’ll sort it when things quieten down.
They don’t quieten down. The site doesn’t get updated.
I’ve seen businesses paying a monthly subscription for a website that hasn’t changed since the week it went live. Two, three years of payments. The site still lists a service they stopped offering. The phone number changed over a year ago. There’s a photo from a shoot that pre-dates the current branding.
You’re not maintaining a website at that point. You’re paying a standing order for something you’ve stopped thinking about.
The afterthought cycle
It tends to go like this. The site goes live, it looks passable, and you mean to improve it. More pressing things come up. The monthly payment goes out and you stop really thinking about it.
Six months later someone mentions your website and you go and look at it properly for the first time in a while. It’s out of date. The about page still reads “new business.” The testimonials are all from the same year. You’d sort it but changing providers feels like a faff, the fee isn’t going to break you, so you keep going.
Another year passes. Nothing changes. The site becomes something you’re quietly embarrassed about but still paying rent on.
You don’t own it
This is the bit that bothers me most. When you stop paying, the site disappears. You don’t have the files. You can’t take it to another developer and ask them to build on it. You can’t move it to a different host. The moment the subscription stops, so does everything you thought you’d built.
So when you eventually decide to get a proper website, you’re not picking up where you left off. You’re starting from scratch. All those months of payments didn’t build you anything you get to keep.
What a proper website costs
A well-built website for a small service business runs somewhere between £1,500 and £4,000. The full pricing breakdown is here, but the short version: at that price, someone has understood your business before designing anything. Strategy, messaging, copy built around who you serve and why they should choose you. A site built for your specific situation, not a template with your name dropped in.
Take that £3,600 you’d spend on two years of a £150 a month subscription and put it toward a proper website from day one. You’d have had something actually working for your business the whole time. The false economy works differently with cheap one-off websites, but at least with those, you know what you spent and it’s done.
At Northern Sauce it’s £2,499. Strategy, copy, design, build. Fixed price, all in, no upsells. After that it’s £25 a month for hosting and support. The site is yours whether you stay or go.
When these offers do make sense
There are situations where these services aren’t the wrong answer. If you’re testing an idea and genuinely not sure it’ll stick, keeping costs down while you figure that out makes sense. Building it yourself on something like Squarespace might actually be the better call in that case, because at least you’re in control of it.
But most of the people I see taking up these deals aren’t testing an idea. They’re established. They’ve got clients. They’re relying on word of mouth because the website’s not pulling its weight. They’re not looking for temporary. They want something that works.
For those people, a free website offer is the wrong answer to a real question.
