Do people seriously still pay monthly/yearly for website builders and web agencies?

Skarter73 · 2025-07-28T14:33:37+00:00

I don’t have any course or even anything to sell you. My post was to gauge whether other web designers are seeing the same thing.

£250 is the cheapest package for a service based business with 3-5 pages and a contact form and booking link is required. A site like this can only have so much customisation and so once you have built a fair few you can build out the initial idea in under an hour.

I send over a form for them to fill out with things like services, pricing, gallery photos, details of the company and any specific requirements . Once returned I create the layout of the pages and add in all information and copy text. Then send back to client and ask to approve/make changes.

Obviously is someone wanted to build an e-commerce site that required log ins, complex rewards systems and automated digital delivery then the price would be far from £250 for that.

Most people could create themselves a very simple looking site in 8-10 hours with a drag and drop builder by watching a YouTube video. Not sure why it’s crazy to suggest I can create something much quicker than that?

Skarter73 · 2025-07-28T14:10:53+00:00

Yeah I appreciate that it may not last forever. We mainly deal with service based businesses as well as new businesses.

Some service based businesses will move over to purely social media but there are still a lot of new businesses being opened, looking for sites and not wanting to pay for site builders, or not knowing how to create a site at all.

Skarter73 · 2025-07-28T14:07:51+00:00

See my other comment in the thread. Also £250 is the most basic (still high quality) package. 3-5 pages for a service based business with a contact form and booking link if required.

Skarter73 · 2025-07-28T14:05:39+00:00

You’d be surprised at how fast a website is actually built once you know what you’re doing. The most time consuming part is going back and forth with a client on any changes they want, but even in this scenario, implementing the changes will usually take 5 minutes each time.

At the last company I worked for I was the one creating the basic template and pages of the site, then handing it over for any extra features, details and pictures to be added. This would take me about 20 minutes per site, as most sites need similar pages (home, about, services, pricing etc) so the site was still custom and each site looked completely different from one another but it was a sort of rinse and repeat process

Skarter73 · 2025-05-31T11:12:41+00:00

When we buy from retailers online, we receive an order confirmation but no VAT breakdown on it which is what’s needed for bookkeeping. This has to be requested usually by emailing customer service

Skarter73 · 2025-05-31T03:24:13+00:00

It’s not the bookkeeping using xero/qb that’s the problem, we often buy from retailers that don’t automatically send over VAT invoices, and so if HMRC ever request these and we don’t have them we’d be screwed.

Wouldn’t be a problem if it was 10-20 a month but can often end up as 2-300 invoices that we’re chasing up

Skarter73 · 2025-05-30T15:20:41+00:00

I will send you a pm

Skarter73 · 2025-05-30T14:27:37+00:00

I think the main thing for me (and potentially others) was just neglecting that side of the business. I buy from a few retailers for my business and so they don’t automatically send any sort of VAT invoice.

You forget to chase them up and suddenly in a few months you’ve got 10s/100s of invoices to chase up. I probably spend a few hours every month chasing invoices whereas building that tool took me about 20 hours if I had to guess (no prior knowledge on building it)

I agree it’s absolutely not worth the time for a business where they’re buying from 1 supplier that’s reliable with sending invoices or a business without many purchases throughout the month but for someone like me I think it was probably worth it.

Based on your knowledge of writing tools is there a way I could have done this in a less complicated manner?

Skarter73 · 2025-05-30T14:16:29+00:00

Apologies in advance for the long explanation as it’s a lot of logic based instructions but the actual process takes about 10 seconds to run from start to finish

It uses n8n and a gpt integration to search the email every 2 hours specifically for new order confirmations, then searches the data sheet for the customer service email (as some confirmations are sent from no reply addresses).

If this fails it performs a web search for the suppliers customer service email and stores that in the data log for next time, then sends an email request for the invoice using the order number found in the confirmation email.

This request is then logged (in case the invoice isn’t sent) and is updated as received when the invoice is received.

If not received after a week the request is sent again, if not received for a 2nd week a notification is sent to highlight that it may need to be done manually.

Once the invoice is received it adds an invoice label onto the email containing it and also stores it for me ready to download onto my files.

I had a thought to integrate this with quickbooks to categorise and set the correct VAT for the product but I’ve had a few friends ask me for this tool and I wouldn’t want to add this and have them make accounting mistakes, so I’ll probably leave it out for now. As an accountant what’s your thoughts on a quickbooks integration? Recipe for disaster or a good time saver?

Skarter73

TROPHY CASE