A proper website for your business. From £750. Live in five days.
Built by one person in Beverley who actually cares. No agency, no account manager, no “get in touch for a quote.” The price is in the headline, because hiding it is a negotiating tactic and I’m not much good at those.
Five working days. The only thing that’s ever made a build late is waiting on the client, so I ask for everything up front.
Five places worth going.
- 01Work
Long-form essays on what I've built and why. Currently shipping Mr Macabre's Tattoo & Piercing in Manchester.
- 02Pricing
Six tiers. Everything visible. What I won't build is in there too.
- 03Process
A five-day build, narrated day by day. Day 1 is the brief. Day 5 the site goes live.
- 04Journal
Where I think out loud. Includes the Site of the Month — one critique of someone else's site, every month, written carefully.
- 05About Jay
The Manifesto. Why a new studio. Why Beverley. The dog (Arwyn) is non-negotiable.
Honest numbers, up front.
Most boutique studios won’t put a price on a website. I will. Six tiers, and what an extra page costs. Read them, decide, then we talk — not the other way around.
See the rates in full →- Quick win — single page, micro-fix
- £300
- Starter — up to two pages
- £750
- Standard — up to four pages
- £1,200
- Premium — up to six, search done properly
- £1,950
- Extra pages — from the seventh onwards
- £175 /page
- Hosting — monthly, cancel any time
- £45 /mo
- Hosting Pro — tweaks + ranking report£75 for the first ten sites that take it, and it stays £75 for as long as you stay on the plan.
- £75 /mo £129
No VAT to add — I’m a sole trader below the threshold. If that ever changes it’ll be because things have gone well, and you will be told rather than surprised.
Jay Costen is a new studio. The work isn’t.
I’ve spent the last eighteen months shipping my own things — PriceScout, a UK price-comparison tool that’s live now; Bytelore, a microlearning subscription; a lead-capture site for a Utility Warehouse partnership. All built solo, all live, all with payment systems, hosting, SSL, the lot. I wanted to know what shipping a real product actually costs in attention before I sold that service to anyone else.
I’ve written up how three of them actually got built — the scan that costs money, the app that was the easy half, and the site that sat finished for weeks on purpose. What each one cost, and the decisions I got wrong.
The first build I’m doing for someone else is a Manchester tattoo and piercing studio — Mr Macabre’s. Once that ships, Jay Costen becomes the chapter where I do this for clients too.
What’s shipped.
A client build in flight, and three of my own things, live and running. A price-comparison tool, a subscription, and a dog-walking round. The full list — with the honest labels — lives on the work page.
See all the work →
Site of the Month.
Every month I take one local business’s website and give it a proper, careful look — what works, what doesn’t, and what it’s costing them.
Free, unsolicited, occasionally uncomfortable. Nobody has asked me to do this. That is rather the point.
How the ritual works →Sixty years on Wilbert Lane. A national Retail Florist of the Year title. Flowers for a royal visit. And the only heading on the homepage belongs to the cookie popup.
The honest list.
Most studios won’t publish a list like this. I think it’s useful — for both of us. If your project is on the list, please don’t take it as a knock; it just isn’t a fit for the shape this studio is.
- 1Online shops with more than 50 products.
Shopify will treat you better than I will at that scale.
- 2Membership, forum or community sites.
Circle, Mighty Networks and Discord exist, are cheaper, and do it properly.
- 3Google or Meta Ads management.
Different job. I build the shop. I don't stand outside it shouting.
- 4Redesigns where the brief is “let's see what happens.”
“See what happens” isn't a goal, it's a weather forecast. I work from bookings, sales or enquiries — something countable.
- 5Sites where I can't talk to the decision-maker directly.
If you need to put me through procurement, you need a bigger studio than this.
- 6Six weeks of meetings before Day 1 of build.
The whole build takes five days. Some studios would still be agreeing the agenda. If you want the long run-up, that's a legitimate way to work — it just isn't this one.
- 7Anything I shouldn't be building.
Hate groups, scams, fake-review operations, gambling, payday loans, MLMs, predatory diet-industry stuff, anything illegal under UK law. The sensible ones.