Outsourcing your web builds solves the delivery problem. It creates a new one: pricing.
When your own team builds the site, you can feel the cost. You know roughly how many days it takes, you know what your designer earns, and you can sanity-check a quote in your head. When a white-label partner builds it, that instinct disappears. You’re handed a trade price and left to decide what the client pays — and most agencies get this wrong in one of two directions. Either they add a thin margin and end up running web projects for almost nothing, or they guess high, lose the deal, and quietly conclude that “web isn’t for us”.
This guide sets out how to price websites you don’t build yourself: what to include in your cost base, how to choose a margin, which pricing model to use, and how to handle the awkward conversations — discounts, scope creep and the client who has a quote from a freelancer for a third of the price.
Start with your true cost, not the trade price
The single biggest pricing mistake agencies make is treating the partner’s invoice as the cost of the project. It isn’t. It’s the largest line in the cost, but there are always others.
A realistic cost base for an outsourced website looks like this:
Partner build cost. The trade price for design and development.
Your account management time. Kick-off, client calls, chasing content, feedback rounds, sign-off. On a typical brochure site this is 4–8 hours. On an eCommerce build it can be 20+.
Content and copy. Who is writing the pages? If it’s you, cost it. If it’s the client, expect delay costs anyway.
Sales cost. Proposal writing, meetings, follow-up. Spread across your close rate — if you win one in three, you’re carrying three proposals’ worth of effort per sale.
Hosting, licences and plugins. Premium themes, forms, booking systems, SSL, hosting for year one if you’re bundling it.
Contingency. Every project has one thing that goes sideways. Budget 10%.
Add those up and the picture changes. A £2,400 trade build with 6 hours of your project management at a £65 internal rate, £180 of licences and 10% contingency has a true cost closer to £3,200. If you quoted £3,000 because “that’s a nice margin on £2,400”, you lost money on the job and didn’t notice until year end.
Action: build a one-page cost sheet for your three most common project sizes. Fill it in before you quote anything, every time.
Choose a margin you can defend
Once you know your cost, the margin question gets easier. Across UK agencies reselling web build work, healthy markups sit in a band:
| Project type | Typical markup on true cost | Why |
| Small brochure site (5–8 pages) | 50–80% | Low risk, fast, mostly repeatable |
| Standard business site (10–20 pages) | 60–100% | More stakeholders, more PM time |
| eCommerce / bespoke functionality | 40–70% | Higher trade cost, higher absolute margin |
| Care plans and maintenance | 100–200% | Recurring, low variable cost |
Two things to notice.
First, percentage margin and pound margin are different animals. A 50% markup on a £6,000 eCommerce build earns you more than an 80% markup on a £1,800 brochure site, for not much more of your time. Don’t chase percentages; chase profit per hour of your involvement.
Second, maintenance is where the real money is. A £4,000 build might earn you £1,600 once. A £150/month care plan earns you around £1,300 a year, forever, on maybe two hours of coordination. Price your build competitively, price your retainer properly, and the maths of the whole relationship improves.
Pick the right pricing model
Fixed price (recommended for most builds)
You quote one number for a defined scope. The client likes the certainty and you like the fact that efficiency gains stay with you.
Fixed price only works if scope is genuinely defined. That means a written spec: page count, template count, functionality list, number of feedback rounds, who supplies content, and what happens if that content is late. Get your partner to quote against the same spec so you aren’t absorbing a gap between what you sold and what they agreed to build.
Day rate or time-and-materials
Useful for open-ended work — ongoing development, phased builds, “we’ll see how it goes” projects. Charge a blended day rate that includes your management time rather than passing through your partner’s hours with a markup on top. Clients react badly to seeing a cost-plus breakdown; they react fine to “our development day rate is £X”.
Value-based pricing
Reserved for cases where the site has an obvious commercial job to do. A lead-generation site for a firm whose average client is worth £20,000 is not a “£3,000 website” — it’s an asset. If you can quantify the outcome, price against the outcome. This requires the client to be genuinely commercial and requires you to be confident. It is not a way to add 40% to a brochure site.
Productised packages
The most under-used model in UK agencies, and the most scalable. Three tiers — say Starter, Business and Commerce — each with a fixed scope, fixed price and fixed timeline. Benefits: quoting takes minutes, your partner builds to a pattern they already know, delivery gets faster, and clients self-select into a budget without a negotiation. If you resell more than one site a month, productise.
Build the price into a structure the client understands
However you arrive at the number, present it in a way that makes buying easy.
Show three options, not one. A single price invites a yes/no decision. Three options invite a “which one” decision. Anchor with the largest, expect most clients to take the middle.
Separate build from run. Quote the build as a capital-feeling one-off, then the care plan as a small monthly. Bundling them into one figure makes the site look expensive and makes the retainer easy to cancel.
Stage the payments. 50% on order, 40% at design sign-off, 10% on launch is standard and protects your cash position because you’re paying your partner as the work progresses. Never let your outflows run ahead of your inflows on a project you’re reselling.
Price the extras explicitly. Additional pages, extra rounds of revision, copywriting, photography, migration of legacy content, training sessions. Have a price list. It turns scope creep from an argument into an order.
Get a trade quote you can actually price against
Your quote is only as reliable as the one you receive. Before you put a number in front of a client, make sure the trade quote answers five questions.
What exactly is included? Number of unique page templates (not pages), forms, integrations, and whether content population is in or out.
How many revision rounds? Two rounds at design stage and one at build stage is a sensible standard. If your partner allows two and you promise the client unlimited, you own the difference.
What’s the timeline, and what triggers it? Most build clocks start when content and brand assets land, not when the order does. Say that to the client in writing on day one.
What happens after launch? Bug-fix window, hosting options, care plan trade prices, hourly rate for ad-hoc changes. Price the whole lifecycle now, not in six months when the client asks.
What’s the change-request rate? Have it in advance so mid-project additions can be quoted the same day. Speed of response is where agencies win goodwill and recover margin at the same time.
A good partner will give you all five without being chased, and will hold trade prices steady for a quoted period so you aren’t repricing live proposals.
Handle the freelancer comparison properly
At some point a client will tell you they’ve been quoted £900 by someone on Upwork. The wrong answer is to defend your price on effort (“it takes us longer”). The right answer is to reframe what they’re buying.
What your price includes that the £900 doesn’t: a named accountable partner, a defined timeline, a tested build, security and backups, someone answering the phone in eighteen months’ time, and no risk that the project stalls halfway through because the individual took a full-time job. You are selling reliability and a route to recourse. That has a price, and clients who have been burned once already know it.
If the client genuinely has a small budget, don’t discount your standard build to reach them. Sell them your smallest package instead. Cutting price to win work you’ve already scoped teaches clients that your numbers are soft.
Common pricing mistakes to avoid
Quoting from memory. Every project gets a fresh cost sheet. Prices from your partner change; so do your own costs.
Forgetting your own time. The most expensive resource on an outsourced project is usually your account manager, and it’s the one nobody costs.
Absorbing scope creep to keep the peace. One “quick extra page” per project, unbilled, wipes out a meaningful slice of annual margin.
Quoting before content exists. Late client content is the number one cause of projects going over. Make content deadlines contractual.
Giving away hosting and maintenance. Free hosting for the first year is a discount you’ll never recover, and it trains the client to see support as free.
Pricing per page. Complexity, not page count, drives cost. Price by templates and functionality.
Never raising prices. Review your rate card every six months. Your partner’s costs move; yours should too.
A worked example
A marketing agency is asked to deliver a 14-page site for a regional professional services firm, including a blog, a filterable team directory and integrated enquiry forms.
Partner trade build: £3,400
Agency project management: 9 hours at £65 = £585
Copy editing and page population: £400
Licences and premium plugins: £220
Contingency at 10%: £460
True cost: £5,065
Applying a 75% markup gives a quote of roughly £8,850, presented as: Standard £7,450
(10 pages, no directory), Recommended £8,850 (as specced), Plus £11,200 (adds copywriting for all pages and a six-month optimisation phase). A care plan at £185/month sits alongside all three.
That is a defensible number arrived at by arithmetic rather than instinct — and it leaves enough margin to absorb the one thing that will inevitably go wrong.
The short version
Price from your true cost, not your partner’s invoice. Include your own time. Pick a markup that reflects risk and effort, not habit. Productise your common builds so quoting stops eating your week. Split build from retainer, and treat the retainer as the profitable half of the relationship. And when the £900 freelancer quote appears, sell reliability rather than discounting.
Get those six things right and outsourced web work becomes one of the highest-margin services an agency can offer.
Not sure what to charge? Use our pricing calculator to get an indicative trade price for your next project in under a minute — then apply the margin logic above. Try the calculator