We use AI, and we pass the saving on. Here is why that is not a boast

There is an uncomfortable fact sitting under the web design industry right now, and almost nobody in it will say it out loud.

Producing a website got dramatically cheaper in about eighteen months. Not a bit cheaper. An order of magnitude. Work that genuinely took a skilled person a fortnight can now be done well in a day, by that same skilled person, using tools available to everybody.

Very few prices moved.

Where the money used to go

It is worth being precise, because "web design is a rip-off" is lazy and wrong. The old prices were mostly real.

A five-page brochure site in 2018 involved someone drawing it, someone building it, someone making it work on phones, several rounds of revisions where each round meant hand-editing markup, and a project manager keeping the three of them in step. That is genuinely weeks of skilled labour. Three or four thousand pounds was not theft, it was arithmetic.

What changed is that the largest line in that arithmetic, the production, collapsed. The drawing and the building and the responsive work and, crucially, the revisions, which were always the expensive part, are now fast.

The choice every agency quietly made

When your costs fall by that much you have two options.

Keep the price and take the margin. Entirely legal, initially very profitable, and what most of the industry did. The client gets the same website for the same money, produced in a fifth of the time. Nobody tells them.

Reprice against the new cost base. Less profitable per job, and it requires you to explain what you are actually charging for, because "it took ages" is no longer available as a justification.

We took the second one, and it is worth being clear that it was not principally a moral decision. It was a positioning one. The first option has an expiry date. Clients work out what these tools can do, because they are using the same ones at work, and an agency defending a 2018 price with a 2026 cost base spends the next few years being progressively found out.

There is a straightforward version of the moral argument too. If the machine did the work, charging as though a person did it is charging for labour that did not happen.

What did not get cheaper

This is the part that matters, and it is why the answer is not "everything should be free now".

Knowing what to build. A model will produce whatever you describe. It has no idea whether that is the right thing for your business, what your customers actually search for, or what your competitors have already covered better. That is research, and research did not get cheaper.

Proving it works. A generated site looks finished whether or not the contact form submits, the listing is claimed, the canonical tags are right, or a crawler can read the page at all. Checking is unglamorous, it is slow, and it is most of the value. We wrote about what usually goes wrong in sites built without that step.

Being there in two years. When you change your prices, take on a partner, or move premises, someone has to change the site and know why it was built the way it was. That is a relationship, and relationships cannot be generated.

Everything outside the website. Your Google Business Profile, your reviews, whether the internet agrees about your phone number. These now determine local visibility more than your homepage does, and no website builder touches any of them.

So what does an honest price look like

It looks like production being close to free and the rest being charged for openly. In our case that means the build cost is small, there is a monthly fee that covers hosting, the domain in your name and changes done for you, and the audit is priced separately because it is genuinely separate work. The current numbers are on the specification, where they sit next to what is actually deliverable, and we would rather you compared them like for like than took our word for it.

The test to apply to any quote, ours included, is simple: ask what the money buys that a competent person with modern tools could not do in a day. A good answer exists. Research, evidence, ongoing responsibility, someone accountable. If the answer is a vague appeal to craft, or a list of deliverables that describes the typing, you are being charged for a cost base that has gone.

The obvious objection

If AI does the building, why not do it yourself and pay nothing?

For plenty of businesses, you should, and we have written that plainly rather than pretend otherwise. The site that is a credibility page for a business fed by word of mouth does not need us.

What you are buying, when you do buy, is not the ability to produce a page. It is somebody carrying the outcome: checking it works, noticing when it stops, and being reachable when you want it changed. Whether that is worth a modest monthly fee depends on how much you want to be the person who owns that problem. Plenty of people happily do. We are not trying to talk them out of it.