"can you build it for free?" the honest answer is: sometimes, exactly, and it depends entirely on what the site has to do. the £0 site is not a myth, but it is far narrower than the people asking for one usually think, and the gap is where unpleasant surprises live.
here is the actual line.
what genuinely costs nothing
a static site, deployed to a free tier, in your own account, runs at £0 a month. that covers more than people expect:
- static hosting on vercel, netlify or cloudflare pages free tiers.
- a global cdn, included.
- serverless functions, within the free-tier limits, enough for a contact form or the odd bit of dynamic behaviour.
the only hard cost on a site like this is the domain, roughly £10 to £15 a year. a portfolio, a brochure site, a landing page: genuinely nothing to run.
what forces you to pay
the moment the site has to remember things or stay awake, something has to be on, and on is not free:
- a database that must not sleep. free database tiers pause on inactivity, and a paused database is a slow first request or an outright error for a real shop.
- an always-on process: a commerce backend, a queue worker, anything that has to be reachable at all times.
- background jobs and cron. scheduled work needs something running to schedule it.
- payment processing beyond the free thresholds, and the card fees that come with every sale regardless.
the breakdown by site type
these are the real tiers, using our own running-cost figures, not a sales pitch:
| what you are running | ~cost / month | what you get | |---|---|---| | static site (+ form via a hosted service) | £0 | portfolio, brochure, landing page. nothing on between visits. | | budget vps, self-managed | ~£5 | lowest real cost for a live backend, but it needs maintaining: updates, backups, ssl. unpatched, it is a liability. | | managed paas (server + db + redis) | ~£20 to £45 | a real store or app that stays up without you administering a server. |
plus card fees on anything that sells (stripe is 1.5% + 20p uk), and the domain.
what "free" should actually mean to a client
when someone asks us to build for free, the useful answer is to scope it. a static brochure site is genuinely £0 to run, and we will hand it over in your own account so it stays that way. a shop or an app is not, and anyone who tells you otherwise is setting you up to discover the bill the hard way, usually when the free database pauses mid-sale. the honest version costs a little; the dishonest version costs more, later.
so: free is real, for the right site. for the wrong site, "free" is a deferred invoice.
planning something and want the running costs straight before you start? that's how we quote. more on the serverless side of this in shipping a store without a server.