A friend runs a mobile bike repair service. For two years his entire web presence was a Facebook page, because the quotes he got for a website were between £400 and £1,200 and he could not tell what he was paying for.
He is not unusual. The gap between "I need a website" and having one has been absurd for a long time — not technically difficult, just full of decisions nobody outside the industry should have to make.
What a small business site actually needs
Strip away everything optional and it is four things:
- What you do, in a sentence someone can repeat to a friend.
- How to reach you. A phone number that dials when tapped.
- Where and when. An area covered, hours, whether you travel.
- Proof you exist. Photos of your work. Three real reviews beat thirty invented ones.
That is a one-page site. Not a compromise — for a trade, a café, a therapist or a photographer, it is genuinely the correct shape. Everything else is a distraction from the phone number.
Why the old route cost so much
Not greed, mostly. It was assembly:
- A domain name, bought somewhere and renewed yearly.
- Hosting, chosen from tiers described in gigabytes.
- Someone to build the thing.
- An SSL certificate, once a separate purchase.
- DNS records connecting the pieces, described in language nobody explains.
Every step was a decision, and every decision needed vocabulary you had no reason to own. The £400 was mostly for someone else to hold that vocabulary on your behalf.
What the afternoon looks like now
Pick an assistant that can publish. Four can: Google Antigravity, Cursor, ChatGPT with Codex and Claude Code.
If you are not already paying for an AI tool, use Google Antigravity. It is free, and it is the only one of the four that keeps this whole article honest — with it, building the site, publishing it and pointing your domain at it costs nothing at any step. Cursor has a limited free tier; Codex and Claude Code come with the paid ChatGPT and Claude plans.
We compared all four if you want the longer version.
Then, in ordinary sentences:
A one-page website for Dave's Mobile Bike Repair. I cover Bristol and Bath, Monday to Saturday, 8am to 6pm. My number is 07700 900123. Puncture repairs, servicing, brake and gear adjustment. I come to you. Clean and simple, not flashy.
You will get a site. It will not be right first time — the colours will be off, or it will have invented a service you don't offer. Say so:
The blue is too corporate, make it warmer. Remove the e-bike section, I don't do those. Make the phone number bigger and tappable on a phone.
That loop is the actual work now, and it is the part you are qualified for. You know your business. The assistant knows how to build a page. Neither of you needs to learn the other's job.
When you like it, ask it to publish. It goes live at a real address with a certificate, in about a minute.
Your own domain, on the free plan
This is the part people do not expect, because at most hosts a custom domain is exactly where free ends.
The free plan here includes one. If you own davesbikerepair.co.uk, you can
point it at your site without paying us anything. You still pay your registrar
for the name itself — typically £10 to £15 a year, and that is the only money
in this entire article.
Your assistant can set it up. Ask it, and it will tell you the one DNS record to add and where to add it. Or do it yourself from your dashboard, which now has a form for exactly this.
Two honest warnings. It takes minutes, not seconds — DNS spreads slowly, so the first ten minutes look broken and are not. And a second domain needs a paid plan; one name pointed at one site is what's free.
What free actually covers
Two websites. 100 MB of storage — more than a one-page site with a dozen photos will use. 100,000 requests a month — requests rather than visitors, since one page view fetches the page plus its images and fonts. For a local trade that is far more than you will use. HTTPS everywhere. One custom domain.
There is no trial period counting down and no card on file. If your bike repair site does what it needs to for six years, that is six free years.
Anything that runs code on a server — a booking system that stores appointments, a login, a form that saves what people submit — works on the free plan too. Signing in with your Google account is the only check there is, and paying does not unlock anything extra: payment buys quota, not capability.
For most small businesses none of that matters anyway. A phone number and a tap-to-call button outperform a booking system nobody fills in.
A realistic afternoon
- 20 minutes describing the business and going back and forth on the look.
- 1 minute publishing.
- 10 minutes on the domain, most of it waiting.
- 20 minutes the next morning, fixing the two things you noticed overnight.
Under an hour of actual attention. The only cost is the domain name, and only if you want one.
The part that is still on you
Being online is not being found. A new site is not in Google yet, and it does not get there by waiting. Put the address on your van, your invoices, your Instagram bio, your email signature. Claim your Google Business Profile, which for a local trade matters more than the website itself.
The website is the thing people check after they've heard your name. Make it easy to find your number, and it has done its job.
Ready? Start here — it takes a minute and there is no card.