DIY means building the site yourself on Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, or WordPress — which sounds like £0 but is never actually free. The real cost is your time, typically 30 to 80 hours spread across evenings and weekends, plus a monthly subscription forever. 1 Week Sites is the paid route: £1,000 once for a bespoke Next.js site, hand-coded, live in seven days, running on your own Vercel account from your own GitHub repo. Over five years a DIY Squarespace site costs £1,500 in subscriptions plus your hours; at a conservative £40 an hour of opportunity cost, 50 hours is £2,000 of your time — so the real DIY total is closer to £3,500. A 1 Week Sites build costs £1,000 plus roughly £60 a year. Pick DIY when you genuinely enjoy the work and the site is low-stakes. Pick 1 Week Sites when your hours are worth more somewhere else.
Real cost
DIY figure assumes 50 hours of your time valued at £40/hr, plus five years on a £25/mo Squarespace plan. Your hourly rate is whatever you actually earn elsewhere.
When DIY is the right call
- You genuinely enjoy making things — the site itself is the fun, not an obstacle between you and your actual work.
- The site is a side-project, hobby, or early-stage test where £1,000 is too much relative to what it's proving.
- You're technically curious and want the learning — the skills genuinely transfer to other parts of the business.
- Revenue and the site are loosely connected — a portfolio, a calling card, a 'yes we exist' placeholder.
When a 1 Week Sites build is the better buy
- Your hourly rate, billed or notional, is above £40 — every hour on the site is an hour lost to better-paid work.
- The site is commercially important — it drives enquiries, bookings, or sales, and DIY quality is visibly costing you.
- You've already started DIY, hit a wall, and realised the last 10% will eat as much time as the first 90% did.
- You want the outcome, not the project. Seven days, fixed fee, live site — the experience you were trying to replicate on your own.
DIY vs assisted-DIY vs hired
DIY sits on a continuum: fully-DIY (Squarespace from a template, you do everything), assisted-DIY (Squarespace template plus a few hours from a Fiverr seller or a Squarespace partner), and hired (someone else builds it). The cost curve looks steeper than it is — going from fully-DIY to hired looks expensive on paper, but assisted-DIY is usually the worst of both. Either own the build yourself or pay someone properly; the middle rarely pays back.
Side-by-side
| DIY | 1 Week Sites | |
|---|---|---|
| Cash cost | £0 upfront, £9–40/mo forever | £1,000 once + £60/yr |
| Your time | 30–80 hours typical | ~2 hours (brief + review) |
| Real five-year cost | ~£3,500 including your time | ~£1,300 |
| Timeline | Evenings and weekends for months | 7 days |
| Quality ceiling | Template-bound, your tools | Bespoke, hand-coded |
| Performance | Mobile Lighthouse typically 50–80 | Mobile Lighthouse 95+ target |
| Accessibility | Rarely gets prioritised in DIY | WCAG 2.2 AA baseline built in |
| Ownership | Yours — and the ongoing work | Yours — nothing to maintain |
| Learning value | Real — you genuinely learn the tool | None — you outsource the craft |
| Opportunity cost | High — hours you could bill elsewhere | Low — two hours total |
Five-year total cost
The honest DIY number includes your time. Fifty hours valued at £40 an hour is £2,000 — that's conservative for most business owners. Add five years of Squarespace at £25/month and you're at £3,500 real-terms. If your hourly rate is higher, the gap widens.
| Option | Five-year total | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| DIY (50 hrs @ £40 + 5 yrs Squarespace Business) | ~£3,500 | your hourly rate is the main variable — reset the figure to yours |
| 1 Week Sites + 5 years of hosting | ~£1,300 | £1,000 build + £60/yr domain & email |
Common questions
I'm going to DIY anyway — what should I use?
Squarespace if you want the least hassle and the most polished result out of the box. Wix if you want more flexibility and don't mind a messier editor. Shopify if you're selling more than a handful of products. WordPress only if you have someone to maintain it. And use my free /resources/launch-checklist before you press publish.
Is £1,000 really all-in?
£1,000 is all-in for a five-to-seven-page bespoke marketing site: brief, design, build, one revision round, launch. No monthly fee, no retainer, no kill fee. You pay for your own domain (≈£12/year) and email hosting (≈£4/month on a provider of your choice). Nothing goes through me.
What if I've already half-built a DIY site?
Common, totally fine. I'll use what's there — copy, images, sitemap, whatever you've wrestled into place — as the brief. The seven-day sprint starts Monday and the new site goes live Sunday on your own domain. Old site gets retired on launch day.
How do I know if my hourly rate justifies hiring?
Rough rule: if you're self-employed and your day-rate is over £200, hiring almost always wins. If you're employed and your evenings are the variable, work out what you'd do with 50 evening hours (rest, family, a side-project) and price those at what they're worth to you. Either way, 50+ hours is rarely free.
What about AI site builders — can't I just use those?
AI builders are fine for a first draft — Wix ADI, Squarespace's generator, Framer's AI — but they all produce the same thing: a site on their platform that looks pretty okay and runs at 50–70 Lighthouse. Same trade-off as any DIY tool, with less learning. The output is a starting point, not a finished site.
When is DIY genuinely the right call?
When the site is low-stakes, your time is free-ish, and you'll actually enjoy the work. A side-project, a community page, a family-run B&B where the owner likes tinkering. If all three are true, DIY is perfect. If any are weak — especially 'your time is free' — the maths usually flips.
Bespoke, live in seven days.
£1,000 flat. Paid upfront. Full refund if I miss day seven. Code, hosting, and domain all in your name.