Pricing, process, timelines, technology, support and what it's like to work with us — the questions we hear most, answered in plain language.
In short: projects start from £5,000 on a fixed scope agreed before work begins, most builds take 4–20 weeks depending on complexity, every enquiry gets a reply within one business day, and every site targets WCAG 2.2 AA and EAA-readiness with manual testing, in up to six languages. The eighteen questions below go into more detail on pricing, process, timelines, technology, support and what it's actually like to work with us — grouped by topic so you can jump straight to what you need. Still have a question that isn't answered here? Get in touch and we'll reply within one business day.
Pricing & quotes
Every project is priced as a fixed scope across three tiers: Launch from £5,000 for marketing sites, Growth from £15,000 for eCommerce stores and web applications, and Enterprise, scoped and priced individually for complex platforms, AI integration and dedicated support. See the pricing page for what each tier includes.
Fixed price. Scope is agreed with you before work starts, so the price you sign off is the price you pay — no surprise invoices for work that was part of the original brief.
The quoted price covers everything listed for your tier — design system, CMS, SEO setup and so on. Ongoing costs outside our control, such as domain renewal, hosting and any third-party software subscriptions your site depends on, are billed separately and agreed upfront. Anything requested beyond the original scope is quoted separately before we start it.
Our process
Six steps: discover, to map goals, users and constraints into a documented scope; design, prototyping with real users; build, static-first and accessible; test, with automated and manual QA; launch, a zero-downtime deploy with monitoring in place; and scale, ongoing iteration once the site is live.
Yes. Design happens before a line of production code is written — we prototype flows, test them with real users where useful, and get your sign-off on the design system before the build stage begins.
The same small, senior team from the first workshop through to launch and beyond — the people who scope your project are the people who build it, so nothing gets lost in a hand-off between departments or agencies.
Timelines
Simple marketing sites typically take 4–6 weeks, eCommerce stores and web applications 8–12 weeks, and complex platforms 12–20 weeks, depending on scope and integrations.
Within one business day, in English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch or Italian.
Usually, yes — fixed-scope pricing comes with an agreed milestone schedule. The main variable is how quickly you can turn around feedback, content and access on your side, since those are the steps outside our control.
Technology
Astro and Next.js with React and Tailwind CSS on the frontend; WordPress, Sanity, Contentful and Strapi for content management; Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and Medusa for eCommerce; AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Vercel and Cloudflare for hosting; and OpenAI, Claude, TensorFlow and LangChain for AI features — matched to what each project actually needs, not a house default. See the technologies page for the full stack.
Bespoke builds — custom marketing and corporate sites on Astro or Next.js, or a managed WordPress build when a CMS fits best. We don’t ship theme-store templates.
Yes — our static-first architecture and image optimisation target 95+ Lighthouse scores across every page and a typical 0.9s LCP at launch, and every build is checked against WCAG 2.2 AA and EAA-readiness with manual keyboard and screen-reader testing, not just an automated scanner.
Support & maintenance
Yes — our website management service covers core, plugin and dependency updates, security patching, backups, uptime monitoring and small content changes, with a monthly report summarising what was done.
Yes — after a short technical audit to understand the existing stack, we can take over maintenance, security updates and performance work for sites built by other agencies.
Uptime monitoring alerts the team the moment an issue is detected, and any support request gets a reply within one business day — critical issues are treated as priority, not queued behind routine tickets.
Working with us
We work in English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch and Italian, and build multilingual sites with proper hreflang from day one. Wave18 has shipped 120+ projects for clients across six EU markets.
No — we're a UK-based studio, but the majority of our work is for clients across the UK and Europe, not just the domestic market.
Yes — our sister agency Ripple18 handles SEO, AI-search optimisation and paid growth once your site is live. Built by Wave18, scaled by Ripple18.
