Engagement and pricing
How I work, and what it costs
Most people in this industry won't tell you what anything costs until you've had two meetings. I find that wastes both our time, so here it is.
Engagement models
| Model | What it is | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Advisory session | 60 minutes on a video call, booked from published slots, with a written summary. The cheapest way to find out if I'm useful. | £175 £450 for three £175 a month retained |
| Technical review | An audit of a platform, infrastructure or site against an agreed scope. Written findings, prioritised, with costed options. | Quoted from scope, before anything starts |
| A piece of work | Migration, integration, infrastructure design, a specific improvement. Scoped first, then priced as an outcome rather than as time. | Quoted |
| Hourly | For anything genuinely small, or for work whose shape only becomes clear as it goes. | £120 an hour |
| WordPress hosting | Productised, per site. Published response windows of 3, 2 and 1 working days by tier. | £25, £45 or £150+ a month |
| Websites | A one page site on your own domain, for a sole trader or small local business. A different buyer from everything above. | £40.83 setup, then £82.50 or £124.17 a year |
| Brochure websites | A multi page site on your own domain, for a business with more than one thing to explain. Up to six pages, built from content you supply or written with you; more at £120 an hour. | £595 or £995 to build, then £199 a year |
| Mailboxes | A real mailbox at your own domain, set up and moved across by a person. Aliases, and SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured properly. | £41.67 a year £25 each additional £75 minimum to migrate |
| Website security report | One authorised automated test of one web application, run with your written permission, written up in plain English with a walkthrough call. The three free checks cost nothing. | £595 £150 retest |
Every price in this table excludes VAT. This is the trade price list and I contract with businesses and organisations, so ex VAT is the number that means something to the person reading it.
Every price is held without VAT, and the pages a sole trader reads show the figure with it added instead. That is why the websites and mailbox rows carry pennies here: the websites page and the email page are read by somebody who wants £99 to be the amount that leaves the account, and £99 including VAT is £82.50 without it. A mailbox is £50 including VAT and £41.67 without. Same price, two ways of saying it, and the label is next to the number on every page. Security testing prices are quoted excluding VAT everywhere.
Process
How it usually goes
-
A call.
Thirty minutes on a video call, free. You tell me what you've got and what's worrying you. Sometimes that's enough and you go away and do it yourself, which is a fine outcome.
-
A review, if it needs one.
Scoped and quoted before we start, so you know the number in advance. I look at what's actually there rather than what the documentation says is there.
-
Findings in writing.
Prioritised, with costed options, and honest about which ones you can ignore. Yours to keep whatever you do next.
Then you decide. I'll quote the work, or you take the document to your own team or to somebody else. There's no obligation past the review and I won't chase you.
Why the review comes first
Almost everything starts with a review, and that is not a sales step. It is the only way to price the work honestly, because what a system actually is and what its documentation says it is are usually two different things.
You keep the findings whatever you decide next. Several people have taken that document to their own team and done the work themselves, which is a perfectly good outcome and one I would rather have than a badly scoped project.
Ownership and exit
For consultancy and infrastructure work, everything is in your name. Your cloud account, your servers, your DNS, your domain, your logins, your data. I have access rather than ownership, and you can revoke it whenever you like.
Hosting is different and I would rather say so here than let you assume. A site on one of my care plans runs on a server I own and share between clients. What is yours there is the domain, the content, the database and the files, and you can have the lot exported whenever you ask. The hosting page sets out exactly what leaves with you and what cannot.
Either way: documented systems, infrastructure as code where it can be, and a clean handover on request. I'll help whoever comes next.
You can leave whenever you want. I'd rather you stayed because it's working.
What I don't do
- Visual design production. I'm not a designer. I'll bring one in.
- SEO retainers, paid ads, social media. Not my field and I won't pretend.
- Open-ended time commitments. No retainer of named days, no standing block of my week, no day rate.
- Very large builds handed over in one piece. I take on work that can be scoped, quoted and finished.
- On-site work.
The last two are worth a sentence rather than a bullet. A one person business that sells a twelve month programme is selling a risk to the client as much as to itself, and the honest version is to break the work into pieces that each stand on their own. If what you need genuinely is a large programme with a team behind it, I'd rather say so at the first conversation than at the third.
WordPress care plans are the exception to the out-of-hours point: those sites are monitored around the clock and server and site level faults are acted on whenever they happen.