A community wellbeing network recently invited quotes for a new website: public site, a secure partner resource area, accessibility to WCAG standard, staff training, and full ownership handed over at the end. The budget was £1,500 to £3,500 including VAT. It is one of the most common briefs in the sector, and it deserves an honest answer: what does £3,000 actually buy?
We have done the same maths for a £10,000 budget. The short version of the method: subtract VAT if your supplier charges it, divide by an honest hourly rate, and see what the hours cover.
The maths at £3,000
£3,500 including VAT is £2,917 of actual work from a VAT-registered supplier. At charity-sector rates of around £90 an hour, that buys roughly 32 hours. From a supplier who is not VAT registered, the full £3,500 buys about 39. Here is where those hours go on a small charity build done properly:
- Discovery, planning and content preparation: 4 to 6 hours
- Design: 8 to 10 hours
- Build and CMS setup: 10 to 12 hours
- Content entry: 4 to 6 hours
- Accessibility checks, launch and training: 5 to 7 hours
That is 31 to 41 hours. In other words: £3,000 buys a well-made website of five to seven pages. Mobile-friendly, accessible, built on WordPress your team can update, with training and full ownership handed over. Delivered by someone senior, nothing skipped. That is a genuinely good outcome, and it is the whole budget.
What does not fit
The brief above also wanted a secure partner portal: logins, a resource library, role-based access. Built properly, that is another 15 to 25 hours, which at this budget means the website or the portal, and the honest supplier says so. The same applies to copywriting support and photography: real services, real hours, not absorbable into £3,000 alongside everything else.
A supplier who quotes £3,000 for the full list has decided where to cut without telling you. We wrote about what that looks like in the £10,000 version of this article, and it is truer at £3,000: template design presented as custom, accessibility claimed rather than checked, training skipped, and a portal that is a page with a shared password.
The portal question, answered honestly
If your network needs to share documents with partners on this budget, you have three real options. A simple password-protected area on the main site covers "partners can download things" for a few hours of build. A well-organised shared drive costs nothing and is often the honest best answer at this scale. A true portal, with individual logins and roles, is a £5,000 to £6,000 project when done properly. Choosing the drive now and the portal in a funded phase two is not settling; it is sequencing.
How to spend £3,000 well
- Spend it all on the website. Five to seven excellent pages beat twelve rushed ones, and every page after launch can be added for a fixed price.
- State the budget in your brief. The network above did, and it meant quotes they could compare.
- Ask what is excluded. The gap between quotes at this level is almost always in what was left out silently.
- Keep ownership. Full admin access, hosting in your name, everything documented. Our website ownership audit covers what that means in practice.
- Budget a little for upkeep. A website has running costs even without a support contract; we have set them out honestly in the no-ongoing-costs website.
What we would deliver for it
For transparency: our Foundation package is £2,995 for up to seven pages, with content support, a donation page with Gift Aid, training, a 30-day warranty, and no VAT because we are not VAT registered. Additional pages are £295 each, whenever you need them. That is our answer to what £3,000 should buy, and you are welcome to hold other quotes against it.
If you are planning a project at this budget, book a free 20-minute call. Bring the wishlist, and we will tell you what fits inside £3,000, what to phase, and what to put in the brief so the quotes you get are comparable.
