Reference, updated August 2026
Renting your website against owning it
This is arithmetic, not an argument. A monthly rental costs less on day one and more by year three. Here is where the lines cross, using our own prices so you can check the sums.
How to read the numbers on this page. The rental column uses a mid market figure of £60 a month with no setup fee, which sits inside the £30 to £100 range advertised by trade website rental providers in 2026. The owned column uses our published New Site price of £999 plus £10 a month for hosting. Swap in your own quote and the shape of the answer will not change much, but the crossover month will.
One, three and five years
Illustrative arithmetic using £60 a month rental against our £999 build plus £10 a month hosting. VAT excluded from both sides.
The crossover lands at around month twenty. Before that, renting is cheaper in pure cash terms. After that, every month of rental is money you will not see again, and the gap widens for as long as the business trades.
If a rental quote includes hosting, support and unlimited changes, compare it against our £999 build plus £45 a month for Care rather than plus £10 hosting. On that comparison the crossover moves out considerably. Compare like with like or the sum is meaningless.
When renting is the better call
Plainly: if you cannot find £999 without putting it on a credit card at twenty per cent, rent. A working site now beats a better site in six months, and cash flow in the first years of a trade business is not a theoretical problem.
- You are in your first months of trading and every pound is committed to tools and van costs.
- You need a site live this week and cannot pause to gather content.
- You are testing whether a new trade or a new area is worth pursuing at all.
- The rental provider will confirm in writing that they will transfer the domain to you on exit. Some will. Ask.
If you do rent, do two things on day one. Register the domain yourself, in your own name, and point it at their site rather than letting them register it. And collect your reviews onto your own Google Business Profile, not only onto their platform. Those two moves cost almost nothing and mean that leaving later is a change of supplier rather than starting again.
The three questions that settle it
- Whose name is on the domain? If it is not yours, you are renting your address as well as your site.
- Whose account holds the hosting? If it is theirs, moving means rebuilding.
- What do I keep if I leave tomorrow? Get the answer in writing before you pay anything, to us or to anyone else.
The arithmetic shifts with the size of the job. On a five figure sale the build cost disappears into one job, which is the case in websites for builders and websites for solar and renewables. On lower value repeat work it takes longer, and websites for plumbers and heating engineers explains how we handle that.
What it costs
Every price is on the site. None of it is behind a call.
£595
Refresh. You have a site, we rebuild it properly.
£999
New Site. The whole thing, built from scratch.
£1,995
Local. The service and area pages that do the ranking.
From £45
A month for a plan, if you want one. Care £45, Growth £295, Growth+ £695.
Read next
What Checkatrade actually costs
The published tiers, what members report paying, and the parts that are not about price.
What a tradesman website actually costs
Rental, one-off, agency and DIY. Real ranges, and where our prices sit inside them.
Alternatives to Checkatrade for UK trades
Directories, Google Business Profile, your own site and word of mouth, weighed honestly.