What a Craft build costs, itemised

Our rates page says builds start at £6,000. That's true, but on its own it doesn't help much, because what a studio wants to know is what a specific site will cost and why. So here's the working: how we break a build into days, what each part usually takes, and the three or four things in a design file that move the total more than anything else.

One caveat first. We price on days, but we quote a fixed figure before we start. What follows is how we get to that figure, not a menu. If we quote £9,400, that's the price whether it takes us nine days or fourteen.

The build that costs £6,000

The floor is a proper site, not a landing page. Typically: five or six templates, a block library of ten to fourteen Matrix entry types, a news or journal section, a contact form, and a Figma file in reasonable order. Roughly, the days go like this:

• Setup and content model: 1 day. Craft install, environments, sections, fields, and entry types worked out from the design before any template is written.
• Block library: 4 days. The bulk of it. Each block is a Twig partial, an entry type, and a check against the Figma frame at two breakpoints. Ten to fourteen blocks at about a third of a day each.
• Page templates and navigation: 1.5 days. Templates are mostly assembly once the blocks exist. The time goes on the header, footer, nav states and the odd page that isn't block-built.
• Journal, forms and integrations: 1 day. Listing, single, pagination, RSS, a form with spam handling, a mailing-list hook if there is one.
• Accessibility and performance pass: 1 day. Keyboard, contrast, reduced motion, Lighthouse on every template rather than just the homepage.
• Control panel tidy and handover: 0.5 day. Field instructions, sensible defaults, a short screen recording for the editor, and the launch itself.

That's nine days, and at our day rate it comes to a bit over £6,000. That's why the floor is where it is. It's the smallest site we can build properly, not a discount to get you in the door.

What moves the number

Almost everything that changes a quote is visible in the design file before we start, which is why we ask for the file before we quote. In order of how much they matter:

Block count. Every distinct component the client can place on a page is a block, and each one costs about the same whether it's a pull quote or a three-column feature grid. A file with thirty components isn't twice the work of one with fourteen. It's closer to two and a half times, because the combinations that need checking multiply too.

Templates that aren't block-built. A case-study page with its own one-off layout, a team page, a pricing table. Each is cheaper than a block, but they reuse nothing, so five of them are five separate jobs.

Content migration. If the site already exists and the words need to move, that's either a script or a person, and both take days. A few dozen pages we'll move by hand as part of the build. Several hundred articles from WordPress is a migration, quoted separately. We've written about how that goes.

Integrations that need testing. A newsletter signup is an hour. A CRM sync, a booking system, or anything with a sandbox that behaves differently from production is a day, most of it spent waiting on the other end.

Multilingual. Craft handles it well, which is why studios underestimate it. Every field decision gets made twice and every template gets checked in a second language, usually one nobody in the room reads.

What doesn't move it

A few things studios expect to be charged for and aren't. Responsive layouts: every block is built at both breakpoints as standard. Accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA. The ninety-day guarantee. Craft and plugin updates within the major version, which sit inside hosting. Setting up staging. Being around on launch day.

We don't itemise these on a quote because they aren't optional. Putting them on separate lines would suggest you could take them off.

A worked example

A quote from earlier this year, lightly rounded. A brand studio, a twelve-page site for a firm of architects, a good Figma file with variants and a proper type scale.

• Content model and setup: 1 day
• 19 blocks: 6.5 days
• Projects section with filtering, and a project template with a gallery: 2 days
• Team and contact templates: 1 day
• 40 existing pages moved by hand: 1.5 days
• Accessibility and performance: 1 day
• Control panel, handover, launch: 1 day

Fourteen days, quoted at £9,800, delivered in fourteen and a half. The extra half-day was the gallery. The design showed one image size and the client's photography arrived at four.

If we get the estimate wrong, that's our problem. The quote is the price.

What the studio does with this

Marks it up. A studio charging its client £18,000 for the site, on a £9,800 build, has spent none of that margin on a developer's salary, a laptop, a licence, or a conversation about pensions. Most studios we build for add somewhere between forty and eighty per cent to our number. Some add more. We only find out if they tell us, and we don't ask.

They also quote faster. If your file has fourteen blocks and a journal, you know it's about six thousand from us before you've sent it. That's why we publish the number.