How I price £10,000 builds (and why founders keep paying it)

Most founders who land on my pricing page do a small double take at the £10,000 number. That is the point. High ticket dev work in the UK should make you pause, because the alternative is a £40k agency invoice with three project managers attached, or a £15/hour Upwork contractor who disappears in week two with half a checkout flow.

Here is how I actually think about pricing.

Hours are a terrible unit

If I bill you by the hour, we both lose. You start counting minutes. I start padding tasks. The fastest engineer on earth gets punished for being fast. Senior freelance Next.js developers in the UK who still bill hourly are basically apologising for being good.

Fixed price means I am paid for the result. If I ship the platform in three weeks instead of six, that is my problem to solve and your problem to celebrate. You get a working product. I get a free week to read a book. Everyone wins.

What you are actually paying for

• Senior decisions, made fast, that survive a year of real users hitting them
• A stack you can actually hire into later (Next.js, TypeScript, Postgres, Stripe, Clerk, Vercel)
• Six weeks of focused build time on a fixed scope I will not let drift
• Zero handoffs, zero project managers, zero account managers, one engineer with the keyboard
• A product that ships, on a date you can put in a deck

Why agencies cost three times more

A London product agency charging £30k is paying for an account manager, a PM, a creative director, a strategist, two junior devs and an office in Shoreditch with a tap nobody uses. You get a deck full of personas before anyone touches a Figma. Founders who need to ship in 2026 cannot afford that org chart.

Solo senior engineers in the UK are eating the agency lunch for one reason. We can build the thing in the time the agency takes to write a kickoff doc.

When £10,000 is the wrong number

If your build is a landing page and a Stripe checkout, you do not need a £10k engagement. You need a Sprint. Two weeks, focused, in and out, and I send you back to your day job. If your build is a multi tenant SaaS with auth, dashboards, billing, integrations and an AI feature, then £10k is the right number because the cost of doing it twice is closer to £40k.

The job of pricing is to make this decision easy. Three tiers, no hourly billing, no surprises. Pick one, sign one page, we start Monday.

Bottom line

If you are a UK founder weighing up agencies, dev shops and solo seniors, the question is never the rate. It is who can actually ship the product. £10,000 buys a senior engineer for six weeks with skin in the game. That is the cheapest path to production software you will find this year.