You have probably seen the numbers and assumed something was wrong. A small business site for £800. A corporate platform for £85,000. Both are websites. Both run in a browser. So how can the gap be that wide?
The answer is not markup. It is what actually gets built. Here is an honest walkthrough of what drives website costs from the low thousands to six figures.
What a typical small business site covers
A professionally built small business website in the £750 to £3,000 range gives you a clean design, solid SEO foundations, mobile optimisation and a contact form that works. It is built on a proven template or lightweight framework, configured for your brand and launched in a few weeks. Our packages at that level include everything a local Edinburgh business needs to look credible and get found online. For most small businesses this is entirely sufficient.
What starts pushing costs above £10,000
Once you move beyond a simple brochure site the complexity increases fast. Custom functionality costs time. A booking system built specifically for your workflow rather than an off the shelf plugin might take four times as long to build and test. Integrations with CRMs, stock management systems or payment providers each add scoping, development and QA time. Every custom element that gets added is a decision, a design pass, a build pass, a testing pass and a revision cycle.
Add in a bespoke CMS so your team can update content without touching code and you are already looking at a meaningfully more complex project than a standard site.
What pushes a project to £30,000 to £50,000
At this level you are typically talking about a platform rather than a site. Multiple user types with different permissions. A client portal or a member area. Ecommerce with custom logic, tiered pricing, trade accounts, inventory feeds pulling from a warehouse system. These projects involve a discovery phase, user journey mapping, wireframing, design system creation, frontend and backend development, integration work and months of testing before anything goes live.
Security and compliance also start mattering more at this scale. Data handling requirements, GDPR compliance architecture and penetration testing are not optional extras for businesses handling significant volumes of customer data.
What actually costs £100,000 and above
Enterprise web platforms at this investment level are built by teams, not individuals. You are funding a senior project manager, a UX researcher, multiple designers, a frontend team, a backend team, a QA engineer and often an accessibility consultant. The timeline is measured in quarters.
What they are building is correspondingly complex: multi-market platforms serving different regions in different languages with different pricing, custom APIs connecting to legacy enterprise systems that are themselves bespoke, load-tested infrastructure designed to handle thousands of concurrent users without slowing down, and accessibility audits that meet WCAG 2.2 AA as a legal requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
The cost is not arbitrary. Every pound maps to time and expertise. A project that needs a team of eight for six months at professional day rates will land in that range almost regardless of who builds it.
Where Wellington Web Co. fits in
We work across the full range. Our core work is clean, well built websites for Edinburgh small businesses but we also take on significantly larger projects through our enterprise service. When a project calls for it we bring in a trusted network of senior developers, backend engineers and specialists who have worked on exactly this kind of build. The team scales to the project rather than the other way around.
That means a £100,000 platform is genuinely on the table. We have delivered complex custom builds, multi-system integrations and long term development retainers for organisations that needed something well beyond a standard agency offering. Our services cover the full spectrum and if you come to us with a large brief we will give you an honest view of scope, timeline and cost before anything else happens. Get in touch to start that conversation.
Unsure what tier your project needs? Use our project estimator to get a realistic figure in a few minutes, or get in touch and we will give you a straight answer.