How much does a B&B website cost in the UK?

Last updated: October 2026

A B&B website in the UK costs anywhere from £25 a month on a rented subscription to £25,000 or more from a general web agency. A hand-built direct booking website from a specialist sits in the middle: £1,999 once, with no monthly platform fee and no commission on your bookings. The right question is not the sticker price. It is what you still owe in year three, and whether you own the site at the end.

Option 1: Do it yourself with a website builder

Cost: your time, plus a monthly plan.

You get templates, a booking widget if you add one, and full responsibility for copy, photos, calendar sync and updates. This suits owners who enjoy the work. It stops suiting most owners in the first busy season, when the website is the last thing anyone has time to fix.

Option 2: A pay-monthly website service

Cost example: £25 per month, nothing upfront.

Over five years that is £1,500, and the payments never stop. Stop paying and the website goes with them, because you are renting it. The appeal is real: no upfront risk and everything bundled. The cost is also real: five more years is another £1,500. Compare the subscription model directly: Lodgify alternative for UK hosts.

Option 3: A general web agency

Published 2026 UK pricing guides put template builds at roughly £800 to £2,500 and agency custom builds at £2,500 to £25,000 or more depending on agency size, before hosting, maintenance plans and copywriting are added (Daedalus puts full-service agencies at £6,000–£25,000+). These are generic business website figures, not B&B-specific quotes.

Agencies build good websites. What they usually do not build is the booking layer: the engine embed, the calendar sync with Airbnb and Booking.com, the policies page a guesthouse actually needs. You may pay agency prices and still finish the hospitality parts yourself.

Option 4: A specialist one-time build

Our complete build is £1,999, once. It includes design and copy written for your property, your rooms and photos, your booking engine embedded (freetobook, eviivo, or Stripe card payments), hosting and domain set up, up to 8 pages, 2 rounds of revisions and a 3-month warranty. Commission on your bookings is 0%, forever. A £9.90 hand-built demo comes first, so you see your actual site before you commit, and the demo fee is credited toward the build. See the pricing section on our homepage.

The five-year maths

Route	Year 1	Five-year total	Do you own it?
Pay-monthly service at £25/month	£300	£1,500 and counting	No
Specialist one-time build	£1,999	£1,999 (plus optional care plan)	Yes
General agency custom build	£2,500 to £25,000+	Build fee plus hosting and maintenance	Yes

Optional extras, only if you want them: a care plan at £499 per year covers small changes, upkeep, hosting and domain renewal. An AI voice receptionist is £149 per month with 100 minutes included. After the warranty, one-off changes are £100 per hour, quoted before any work starts.

The costs nobody puts in the headline

• Booking engine: freetobook's engine is free. Its channel manager costs £1.50 per channel booking, minimum £9 a month, capped at £99 a month, plus a one-off £49 connection fee per channel. eviivo bills at its own current rates.
• Card payments: if you take cards through your own Stripe account, UK cards cost about 1.5% + 20p per payment, paid to Stripe.
• Domain: around £10 to 15 a year for a .co.uk if you renew it yourself. It is registered in your name.
• OTA commission avoided: every booking that moves from an OTA at around 15% to your own site at card-fee cost only is money the table above does not count. On a £400 booking, that difference is roughly £54 per booking. See the Booking.com commission guide for the maths.

Which route fits your B&B?

• One or two rooms, low booking volume, time to tinker: a builder or a pay-monthly service can be enough.
• You already take OTA bookings every week and the commission line annoys you: the one-time build pays for itself fastest, because the saving starts with the first direct booking.
• You are opening or rebranding and need the whole thing done properly, once: specialist build, then decide on the care plan after the warranty ends.

Common questions

Is £1,999 really the full price?

Yes for the build itself: design, copy, booking engine embed, hosting and domain setup, up to 8 pages. Third-party costs (your domain renewal, freetobook channel fees if you use them, Stripe card fees) are paid by you directly to those providers, at the rates listed above.

What if I need changes later?

Small changes are covered by the care plan at £499 per year. Without it, changes after the 3-month warranty are £100 per hour, always quoted first.

Can I keep my existing booking system?

Yes. We embed freetobook or eviivo, or take payments through Stripe. You keep your existing account either way.

Why not just use a free builder?

You can, and plenty of owners do. The cost shows up as time, template limits, and a booking flow guests have to work at. This page exists so you can compare the routes with real numbers before you choose.

Last checked: 13 October 2026. Figures: directbook.uk pricing and the third-party sources linked in this guide (The Sequence, Daedalus Design, freetobook, eviivo, Stripe). Third-party rates are set by those providers and can change; confirm current rates with them. General guidance only, not financial advice.