You got quoted £28,000 for an 18-page website. The agency sent a 47-slide proposal deck. The timeline is five months. Before any design work starts you have a discovery workshop, a stakeholder alignment session, and a creative brief sign-off.
Here's the dirty truth. Most of that £28k is not going into the work. It's going into the cast.
The legacy agency cast list
A typical agency engagement involves something like this. Read it out loud and ask yourself whether you'd hire each of these people as an individual to touch your 18-page website.
- Account Manager. Does no actual building. Sits between you and the people who build. Takes a 20-minute weekly call and relays your feedback to Slack. Costs: £600/day.
- Project Manager. Creates Gantt charts nobody looks at. Sends status emails nobody reads. Costs: £500/day.
- Creative Director. Approves design work done by the designer. Adds one note per round. Costs: £800/day.
- Senior Designer. Does the work. Finally. Costs: £550/day.
- Junior Developer. Builds most of it. Learning on your pound. Costs: £400/day.
- Tech Lead. Reviews the juniors' code in a rush on a Friday. Misses things. Costs: £650/day.
- QA Analyst. Finds the bugs the senior should've caught. Costs: £400/day.
- SEO Consultant. Fills in a spreadsheet template. Costs: £700/day.
That's eight people. On your 18-page website. It is the most expensive way imaginable to build something that a senior plus a laptop could build in three weeks.
The agency model in this country exists to give middle managers somewhere to work. The actual building happens in spite of the structure, not because of it.
Where your £28k actually goes
Roughly: £5k on the design and build itself. £8k on salaries of people who sit in meetings about the design and build. £6k on office overhead (London rent, Slack licences, sales pipeline). £4k on agency margin. £3k on the sales team who won you. £2k on the discovery workshop you will remember as the time you lost a day of your life.
You are paying for the cast. The product is incidental.
What AI changed
In 2023 the maths broke. A senior with Claude and Cursor and a handful of good prompts can do in three days what a five-person team does in three weeks. The junior dev, the QA analyst, the SEO consultant's spreadsheet, the template parts of the design, AI demolishes all of it as a cost centre.
The account manager and the project manager still exist. But now they cost more than the actual work.
That's where we come in. A senior, an AI, a laptop. Your site in a fortnight. Under a quarter of the price. Same quality or better, because the senior is doing the work instead of reviewing the junior's.
What to do about it
If you've been quoted £25k+ for a site under 20 pages, stop. Don't sign. Ask three questions.
- Who actually writes the code? If the answer involves three names and a "senior reviews", walk away. You're paying the senior AND the juniors.
- What does a full-day breakdown look like? Ask for hours per discipline. You will be astonished how few go into design and build versus meetings.
- Is there a fixed-price alternative? A senior on fixed price has every incentive to be efficient. A team on time-and-materials has the opposite incentive.
Or just send us the URL. We'll tell you what a rebuild costs at the new maths. No deck.