A small business website used to cost £30,000. By the late 2010s, with a Wix or Squarespace template and a freelancer, you could get something acceptable for £3,000. Today, on a subscription, it's £15 a month. The work is roughly the same. What changed is the maths underneath.
This piece is about that maths, because most customers walking onto our marketing page can't quite work out where the difference comes from, and that's a fair instinct to interrogate. If you're paying a tenth of what something used to cost, where's the trick?
The honest answer is that there isn't one — but there are some real trade-offs you should know about, and an underlying shift in the cost structure of the work that's worth understanding before you sign up.
What an agency was selling
The £30,000 agency build, around 2015, was paying for: a project manager (200-300 hours), a designer (60-80 hours), a developer (100-150 hours), a copywriter (40 hours), a photographer (a day, plus retouching), a brand consultant (occasional), and the various overheads of running an agency that could field that team. Strip out the overheads and you've still got 400-500 hours of skilled work going into a small business marketing site.
That 400-500 hours included a lot of coordination overhead — meetings, reviews, sign-offs, revision rounds, status updates — that the customer was paying for but not really getting anything from. A talented solo freelancer could cut that overhead and produce a similar site for £8,000–£12,000 if they were working efficiently and the customer didn't change their mind too often.
The Wix-template-and-a-freelancer model that emerged in the 2010s was a furthercompression: skip the original design, pick a templated layout, drop the photography budget, and wire it together in 30-50 hours of freelance time. £2,000–£4,000 was reasonable. The result wasn't bespoke and it didn't read as bespoke, but it was a working website at a price the small business could justify.
That's the model the working small business has been operating on for a decade. It's not a great model.
What the model gets wrong
The trouble with both the £30k bespoke build and the £3k templated build is the same trouble: they're projects, with a definite end. The site ships, the freelancer or agency moves on, and the customer is alone with a piece of software that needs maintaining for the next ten years. Nobody budgeted for the maintenance because nobody had a clean way to charge for it on a subscription that worked.
The maintenance work — SSL renewal, content updates, performance monitoring, the small fixes that keep a site working — is cheap per item. A few minutes here, an hour there. But it's continuous. Across a year, on a working site, it's probably 20-40 hours of small interventions. At freelancer rates of £40-80/hour that's £800-£3,200 of yearly maintenance, which is a real number, and most small businesses didn't pay it. So the site rotted, and three years later they paid for a rebuild, and the cycle continued.
The £3k-build-and-rot model was never quite the bargain it looked like. It just hid the cost.
What changed underneath
Two things changed in the early 2020s and they shifted the maths irrevocably.
The first was hosting. In 2015 you needed a cluster of services — a CDN, a database, an email relay, a storage bucket, a backup tool, an SSL certificate authority — and stitching them together for one customer cost more in setup time than the small business could justify. By 2024 hosting had consolidated into a small number of integrated platforms where one click bought you the whole stack at near-zero variable cost. Hosting stopped being a fixed cost per customer and became a small marginal cost shared across a portfolio.
The second was the design and build work itself. The 400 hours an agency spent on a £30k build wasn't a fixed cost in the same way — there was always going to be SOME marginal hour cost per customer for design and copy and structure — but the proportion of that work that genuinely required a senior designer's judgement was always smaller than agencies were willing to admit. Decisions about layout, typography, hierarchy, visual rhythm — these decisions can be made quickly by someone who's seen it done a thousand times. Most of the 400 hours wasn't decision-making. It was production.And production work is what's compressed when the right tools are in place.
We sit in the middle of that compression. The platform we run does the production; the senior eye on the work is mine. The maths that used to require 400 hours and a team is now closer to one hour of orchestration on my end, plus a few hours of platform compute time, plus the marginal hosting cost. The 400 hours hasn't gone anywhere — the customer still gets 400 hours of equivalent design judgement — but the way that judgement is produced has changed shape.
What the £15 doesn't pay for
Honest acknowledgements. The £15/mo Starter tier doesn't pay for:
- A custom photography shoot (you'd want one anyway if your products live or die on imagery; we generate plausible imagery and let you replace it).
- A senior designer in a meeting room with you for three hours debating shades of green (you can have those conversations through Forge in 20-30 minutes if you like, but you're not getting a face-to-face design crit).
- A bespoke CRM integration or a deeply custom commerce flow (we do commerce; we don't do enterprise B2B).
- Hand-coded animation polish (we use modern CSS for motion; we don't engage a motion designer).
- A copywriter who knows your brand intimately because they've worked with you for two years (we hold the voice well, but a long-relationship copywriter is a different kind of asset).
If those things genuinely matter for your business, ThemeSmith is the wrong service. We're not pretending to be agency-quality at a tenth the price. We're delivering most of what an agency-quality site needed, at a fraction of the price, for the small businesses for whom an agency was always the wrong shape of contract.
What it does pay for
In return for the £15 (or £39, or £99 a month, depending on tier), you get:
- The build itself — the site you're paying for, generated to the editorial standard we hold.
- Hosting that doesn't fail and doesn't bill you separately.
- Continuous maintenance — the SSL, the meta updates, the broken-link sweep, the performance enforcement.
- A conversational way to make changes when you need them (Forge).
- A site that improves over time on the higher tiers, with safety nets in.
- Honest framing of trade-offs.
That's the thing that's new. The shape of the deal — pay a small monthly amount, get a site that ships fast and stays good — wasn't economically possible until the underlying maths shifted. Now it is. The bargain isn't a trick.It's a different shape of work, made possible by a different cost structure, sold at a price that finally fits a working small business.
The agency model isn't dead — it's still right for the businesses with five-figure budgets and complex needs. But for the £150-a-month-margin florist on Mare Street, agency was always wrong, and the templated build was a slow disappointment. The subscription is what should have been on the table all along.
It just took until 2026 for the maths to allow it.