The founder
Gary Cheers. thirty years in. Still pissed off.
I've spent three decades watching good businesses get done over by bad agencies. Cowboys who bill like consultants and deliver like chancers. Unf-ck is the brand I wish had existed when I started out, built to pull SMEs out of digital despair and situations that were rarely entirely of their own making. So I built it.
Why Unf-ck exists
The short version. told honestly.
I've lost count of the phone calls that start the same way. "We spent £30k with a London agency. Nine months. We got a site that's slow, won't convert, and they've gone quiet on our bug reports." Or: "Our last developer left. We can't edit anything. Help."
For years the answer was bad. Either you hired another agency that would bin what you had and quote you £40k to start again, or you hired a freelancer who'd go dark when the second bug report came in.
The agency model has been broken in this country for a decade. Account managers, project managers, creative directors, QA leads. An eight-person team to rebuild a 12-page website. The maths stopped making sense years ago. AI finished the job.
The economics of a rescue are now obvious. A senior plus AI can do in three weeks what a legacy agency quotes six months for. You should pay the price the work takes, not the price their overhead demands.
Unf-ck is the brand that does the job at the new price. Fast. With the receipts to prove it's not shortcuts. Senior judgement on every call. AI doing the volume. No juniors on your account learning on your pound.
That's the whole pitch. No deck, no framework, no four-letter process acronym. Just the work, done properly, at a number that makes the cowboys look ridiculous.
- 30 yrs In digital and e-commerce
- AI-first Senior-led, AI-accelerated delivery
- UK-led No offshoring, no white-label
- Senior-only No juniors on your project
The career, compressed
The shape of it. thirty years.
Not a CV. The shape of how I got here and why the answer to the current mess looks the way it does. Specific milestones and dates confirmed with Gary before launch.
- Mid-1990s
The early web. Netscape Navigator, dial-up, flashing 'Under Construction' GIFs on every other site. Tables inside tables inside tables. Publishing online felt like magic and mostly looked like chaos.
- Early 2000s
Dot-com crash. The agencies that had been quoting six-figure 'web experiences' vanished inside a quarter. The bubble hid the truth until it didn't. The survivors were the ones actually shipping.
- Mid-2000s
WordPress 1.0. Joomla. Drupal. Every CMS promised 'democratised publishing'; every one of them eventually became a cowboy's business model. The plugin economy formed in real time.
- Late 2000s
The independent developer era. Sites increasingly built outside agencies by solo specialists. Every disappeared contractor left a rescue job behind. The modern rescue market was born, and hasn't slowed down since.
- Early 2010s
Responsive design. Mobile stopped being an afterthought. Plenty of agencies billed clients twice for 'mobile sites' that were just a parallel build of the same content. A lot of those still live.
- Mid–late 2010s
React. JAMstack. 'Headless' became a magic word that doubled quotes without doubling delivery. Half of mid-sized SMEs got sold a stack they didn't need, and couldn't afford to change.
- Early 2020s
Pandemic. Every SME suddenly needed a working site this week. Agencies doubled their rates for the privilege of being six months late anyway.
- 2023–25
AI actually arrived. Inside six months the cowboy economics got exposed: what used to take eight people and four months stopped making sense. The 'AI-first' agencies formed, pivoted, rebranded, and quietly raised their rates.
- 2026
Unf-ck launches. A brand designed around what the industry needs in 2026, not what it looked like in 2006, pulling SMEs out of digital despair and the challenging situations they've been left in, often not of their own making.
What I believe
Seven principles. non-negotiable.
- P/01
No juniors on your project
AI does the juniorable work. A senior does every call. No 'we've assigned you to Katie who joined last month'.
- P/02
No bluff on what we don't know
If a problem is outside our competence, or outside our confidence, we say so and bring in a trusted, vetted specialist who works to our standards. Pretending to know something you don't is how cowboys stay in business. We take the other road.
- P/03
Triage before quote
We tell you what's salvageable before we ask you for a penny. Nobody pays us to manufacture work.
- P/04
Real prices in daylight
Everything from £250 is on the site. No 'enquire for a quote'. No retainer trap. No surprise scope-change invoice six weeks in.
- P/05
You own what we ship
CMS you can actually edit. Code you can hand to anyone. No lock-in, no hostage, no phase-two gotcha.
- P/06
Cowboys stay anonymous
We call out categories, not firms. Naming specific agencies is satisfying and also unhelpful. The behaviour is the target.
- P/07
AI-first. Humans where they help.
Bleeding-edge coding agents, automated QA, parallel research. A senior on every call, every decision, every signature. Humans get in the way of progress; we don't let them. We use them where they add value and nowhere else. That's why what takes a legacy agency months takes us days.
On the name
If the brand offends you, that's fine.
Some people see the name, wrinkle their nose, and click away. Fair enough. It's a choice. A brand that tries to appeal to everyone usually appeals to no-one, and this one isn't trying.
Here's the truth. I find f-cked websites, broken digital promises, and the cowboys who deliver them about a hundred times more offensive than anything I'm going to say or do on this site. I'm not the one who should be apologising.
I have integrity. I do good work. I deliver results. I charge a fair price and I stand behind it with a money-back guarantee. If a four-letter brand stops us from working together, we were never going to work together anyway.
What actually bothers me is what the audits keep showing. More than half the people currently invoicing UK SMEs for digital work haven't got a clue what they're doing. I don't mean that abstractly. I mean it in the specific, forensic, this-is-actually-in-the-report sense. Every week I see fresh evidence. Three decades in and the standard isn't getting better. It's getting slicker at hiding itself.
The cowboys are the problem. The name is the response.
So, cowboys, I'm coming for all of you. Gary Cheers, Founder
Currently
What's on the bench.
Updated manually by Gary. Usually accurate within a fortnight.
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Three rescues in flight this month. Two WordPress, one Squarespace.
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Writing the SEO Unf-ck playbook. Publishing end of May 2026.
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Taking referrals from the three UK agencies I still respect.
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Reading too much about AI eval frameworks. Sorry about that.
Work with me
Still reading? send me a url.
I answer my own email. No sales team, no assistant, no CRM sequence. Just a useful reply within a working day.