Template or bespoke — what are you actually paying for?

The usual comparison is a monthly template platform: fifteen, twenty, maybe forty pounds a month, no big number up front, cancel any time. Against that, a one-off fee for a hand-built site can look expensive by comparison.

But that comparison is measuring the wrong thing. It compares a price tag to a price tag, when what actually matters is what each route costs you in total, and what you're left holding at the end of it.

A template subscription's monthly fee is only part of what it costs you. The rest is paid in hours: choosing a layout, fighting with a font, rewriting a homepage at eleven at night, watching a tutorial about spacing that should have taken five minutes and somehow took forty.

Those hours have a real cost, even though no invoice ever itemises them. They're hours not spent seeing clients, not spent resting, not spent doing the part of the work you actually trained for. Add the subscription up over two or three years, add your own time at whatever your hourly rate actually is, and the "cheaper" option often isn't.

And at the end of it, as our previous piece on interchangeable design touched on, you're frequently left with a site built on the same layout as several other therapists' — because that's what the platform is designed to produce.

At the more modest end, a Foundation package (£750) covers four hand-built pages — typically Home, About & How I Work, Fees, and Contact — with basic SEO, a site that behaves properly on every device, one round of revisions, and three months of care after launch. That's not a starting quote designed to be upsold. It's a complete, working website.

Established (£1,150) and Signature (£1,650) build on that with more pages, more premium detail, and progressively more of the work — copywriting, SEO setup, directory profile optimisation — handled for you rather than left as something you still have to figure out yourself.

This is easy to overlook, but it matters financially, not just philosophically. A hand-built site comes with full ownership and no platform lock-in. If you ever want to move it, change how it's hosted, or hand it to someone else to maintain, you can.

Leaving a template platform, by contrast, usually means starting again from nothing. The pages, the layout, the years of small tweaks — none of it necessarily travels with you. In effect, you can end up paying for the same website twice: once in subscription fees, and again when you eventually rebuild it properly somewhere else.

Because I'm a psychotherapist as well as the person building your site, the brief doesn't have to be translated for someone outside the profession. We can talk about your actual clients, your actual way of working, and what a prospective client would need to feel before they'd consider getting in touch — and build the site around that directly.

That's not a soft add-on. It's the difference between a site that merely exists and one that's actually doing the job discussed in the rest of this series: helping the right client recognise, quickly and specifically, that you might be the right therapist for them.

Not a page count. Not a template with your name typed into it. You're paying for a website built once, properly, around the practice you actually have — plus the ownership, the specificity, and the process behind it that a subscription simply isn't set up to offer.

Seen that way, the maths tends to work out better than it first appears. Two or three well-matched ongoing clients can cover the cost of a site within a few months — after which it's simply yours, doing its job quietly in the background, for as long as you need it to.

First Meeting designs and writes distinctive websites for therapists. As a practising psychotherapist, I build every site as a single, fully-owned asset — not a subscription you're gradually paying to rent a template.