Disclosure: we are Fortitude Media, the Web Team is our department, and our co-founder ran a seventy-person web agency for years, building for Honda, O2 and Castrol. This page is written with respect for good agencies and no patience for the economics that era forces on clients.
Last checked: 20 July 2026.
The short answer
A bespoke agency website typically costs £20,000 to £50,000 to build, takes three to six months, and then ages: a support retainer of £500 to £2,000 a month keeps the lights on but rarely adds a page. Fortitude's Web Team is a standing department at £249 a week: it builds your site on Press, our AI-first CMS, at a fixed price agreed at Discovery, then runs it like a publication, new pages answering real buyer questions weekly, links and PR earned, upkeep and speed maintained, so the site compounds instead of dating. The blunt way to choose: if a website is a project to you, hire an agency; if being found is an ongoing fight, you need a team, and standing human teams at this cadence cost £60,000 a year and up.
Two different products wearing one name
The agency build. Discovery workshops, design rounds, development, launch. At its best you get craft: a distinctive brand expression, custom functionality, a site your team is proud of. Then the economics turn. The team that knew your site disbands to the next project. The retainer covers bugs and small tweaks, priced per request. Publishing depends on your staff finding time in a CMS they touch monthly. Eighteen months later the news page says "Welcome to our new website" and the industry has moved two AI model generations on.
The standing department. The Web Team treats your site as an operation, not an artefact. Build first, on Press: fast, structured, AI-readable by default, fixed price agreed at Discovery. Then the actual job begins: every week it researches what your buyers are asking (including what they ask AI assistants, which is where Sentinel data feeds in), writes and ships pages that answer, earns links and mentions, fixes what breaks, and reports what moved. The site gets stronger every month because someone is always on shift.
The comparison, honestly
| Web agency | Web Team (AI) | |
|---|---|---|
| Build cost | £20,000 to £50,000 typical bespoke | Fixed price agreed at Discovery |
| Build time | Three to six months | Weeks |
| After launch | £500 to £2,000 a month maintenance | £249 a week: publish, earn, maintain |
| New content | Your staff's spare time | Weekly, drafted and shipped for approval |
| Links and PR | Rarely included | Part of the job |
| Craft ceiling | Highest, their real strength | Excellent and consistent; not art-project territory |
| Team continuity | Disbands at launch | Never leaves |
| Ownership | Varies by contract | Your domain, your content, yours to keep |
The arithmetic
Five-year cost of the agency route at the midpoints: a £35,000 build, £1,000 a month support, and a £30,000 refresh in year four: roughly £125,000, for a site that grew by perhaps a page a month in a good year. The Web Team over the same five years: the fixed build plus £64,740 of department (£12,948 a year), delivering hundreds of shipped, question-answering pages, continuous link earning and a site that never needs the year-four rebuild because it never stopped being current. The deeper point is what the spend buys: the agency model spends most of the money on the two launch moments; the department spends it on the 258 weeks in between, which is where search engines, AI engines and buyers actually make their minds up.
Where the agency wins
If your brand lives or dies on distinctive craft, a luxury label, a design-led consumer brand, an experience site meant to win awards, hire the best agency you can afford; that ceiling is theirs. If you need genuinely custom application development (portals, complex integrations, product-grade software), that is an engineering engagement, not a marketing site. If you already employ a strong in-house web and content team, they may only want Press as their platform rather than the department around it, and that is a fine way to buy from us. And whichever route you take, most sites we audit do not need a rebuild at all; we say so in writing at Discovery, because prescribing rebuilds reflexively is exactly the agency habit this department exists to end.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a business website cost in the UK in 2026?
A bespoke agency build typically runs £20,000 to £50,000 with three to six months of project time, plus £500 to £2,000 a month in support afterwards. Fortitude's Web Team builds on Press at a fixed price agreed at the £1,500 Department Discovery (credited in full), then runs the site at £249 a week including weekly publishing, link earning and upkeep.
What does the Web Team actually do every week?
It researches the questions your buyers are asking, including what they ask AI assistants, writes and ships pages that answer them, earns links and PR mentions, keeps the site fast and technically healthy, and reports what moved. Everything publishes through your approval queue in AI Assisted mode until you promote routine actions to Autopilot.
Do we keep our design, domain and content?
Yes. Your domain, your content and your design are yours, including if you cancel; the pricing is weekly precisely so you never stay out of contractual gravity. Where a rebuild is genuinely needed, existing rankings, URLs and design equity are preserved deliberately, and where it is not needed we tell you so at Discovery.
Why does continuous publishing matter so much now?
Because both search and AI engines favour sites that keep answering current questions with real substance, and buyers now ask AI assistants directly. A site that stopped publishing at launch fades from those answers; a site that answers something new every week compounds. This is the same reason our own site runs on this department.
Can the Web Team work with a site we already have?
Yes. If your current platform is sound, the department runs it as-is; if it is holding you back, the Discovery says so with evidence and a fixed-price path to Press. Most sites we audit do not need rebuilding, and we put that in writing.