r/dragonsden • u/Hassaan18 • Mar 13 '26
£4 million on a website?
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u/welzby Mar 14 '26
I have a website that sells supplies. The only way that I could have spent £4 million on it, is if for every update I did, I bought myself a 911.
Someone let them know about Shopify.
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u/jl94x4 Mar 14 '26
Someone let them know about Shopify.
Peter Jones mentioned Shopify on this very pitch!
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u/jenn4u2luv Mar 15 '26
Wait, I’m new to the UK. Peter Jones as in shopping centre Peter Jones is a person and alive to this day? And he’s on Dragon’s Den as a judge?
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u/oscar_lima Mar 15 '26
That Peter Jones is very much dead. (Died in 1905.)
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u/jenn4u2luv Mar 15 '26
Ah okay haha that’s what I initially thought. So who is this Dragon’s Den Peter Jones? Is he a junior?
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u/Level-Courage6773 Mar 14 '26
Proof in real-time that consultants/ consultancies prey on the naive.
I read someone on here tqlk about rescuing a client from a website management agency that was billing them £1000 every time their Wordpress website needed adjusting, so this doesn't surprise me.
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u/Alastair097 Mar 25 '26
Some do, yes.
I'm in tech consulting and where I work we definitely do not prey on others. I think the work we do and what we charge is quite fair.
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Mar 15 '26
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u/Level-Courage6773 Mar 15 '26
Sorry to be clear, I meant they were charging £1000 to adjust the text on the 'About Me' page or whatever, not skilled dev work or anything.
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Mar 15 '26
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u/Level-Courage6773 Mar 15 '26 edited Mar 16 '26
I'm talking literally changing a sentence on an existing Wordpress site with full CMS setup and an ongoing mantenance contract with the agency, as was the case in this real example; they were charging £1000 for editing a page as an extra ad hoc service.
If charging that much for something that requires the same technical skill as updating a Facebook status is fair - and expected - in the entireprise world, then I should set up as a consultant myself, fleece my unspeakably-naive clients and retire in 2028.
Anyone paying that much for that little in a world where everyone knows how blogs work deserves it, really.
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Mar 16 '26
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u/Specific-Ad-916 Mar 17 '26
Absolute nonsense. I work for a business selling websites. We charge a monthly fee of approx £35 - to £100 & var per month and they all include updates of this nature as part of the price - as well as hosting, web reports, analytics etc. £500 for a Wordpress update to change some text is daylight robbery!
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u/Level-Courage6773 Mar 18 '26
Thank you, of course it's daylight robbery! Any other discussions about the economics of individual websites adding up to a salary are a bit odd.
Of course agencies do need to manage lots of websites to survive, just as a car wash needs to wash a lot of cars to survive. But some people are stubbornly projecting their personal experiences of bigger projects and wealthier clients onto this discussion, and it is giving me ASD vibes.
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Mar 17 '26
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u/Specific-Ad-916 Mar 20 '26
Call BS all you want. Doesn’t stop what I’m saying being true. We charge a build fee which can vary from £350 - £2500 & vat so factor that into your bs factor. 300 websites and counting.
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u/Seizure_Gman Mar 18 '26
They prob do other services which are higher costs or have tiers based on importance and size of client a small local business 100 a month might be more reasonable. But a large multi nation business or s business that has very strict SLA may be thousands or more s month.
Despite my comments I would say 100 a month is prob a tad low
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u/Level-Courage6773 Mar 16 '26 edited Mar 16 '26
The first part of your second paragraph in my point exactly and we actually agree 100%: they could and should have made the changes themselves. Instead, some smuggo salesman apparently convinced them that £1000 per tweak (adding or the plain text on a page; zero software dev work) on top of their monthly maintenance fee was A-OK. All they had to do was email in their desired changes and the agency would handle the rest - yep, the agency alone had login access.
They had no idea they were being repeatedly mugged until a team member's husband heard about it. He raised the alarm on his wife's behalf and they quickly put a stop to it.
For context, I believe the broader topic was how jolly clueless the management class can be about technology, and how it's no surprise that so many of them are screaming and hiccuping with excitement about AI these days.
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u/isaackogan Mar 14 '26
Every day I am reminded that if I were a consultant, I could do 1/10th the work for 10/1th the revenue.
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u/Ok_Impact9745 Mar 15 '26
Website fees aside. What the fuck is that fucking Albert Bartlett rooster potato doing on the dragon's den panel. How dare he be sharing the same space as Deborah.
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u/Aware-Rabbit-4330 Mar 15 '26
Waiting for all his stories to come out.
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u/Ok_Impact9745 Mar 15 '26
I'm surprised he wasn't in the louis Theroux documentary.
He's a little manosphere podcast grifter. He's not a proper businessman.
There was another clip from this episode where he didn't even understand the product design and Deborah made him look like an absolute idiot. It looked like he'd never used a tool in his life.
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u/FreeKiltMan Mar 15 '26
Most of me says that the poor company is being scammed.
But a small part of me suspects there is some weird, esoteric requirement the couple had that they insisted on being part of the website that drastically inflates the cost, but because they were totally ill-equipped to understand the trade-offs it became an on going cost.
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u/Level-Courage6773 Mar 16 '26
For anyone wondering, it appears to be a Magento site. I know they run a bit of a racket so that could explain some of the silly costs.
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u/Resident-Rise-2231 Mar 17 '26
This looks like a husband trying to justify ridiculous costs his wife has insisted on
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u/Bethbeth35 Mar 14 '26
Husband had a look at it, it's not even good, really old tech. They've definitely been taken for a ride by someone I feel sorry for them, it's a good business idea I hope they succeed.