The In-House Myth: Why Aliora Managed Services Costs Less Than Doing It Yourself

The promise that never quite paid off

Somewhere around a decade ago, a very sensible-sounding idea took hold in small business: bring the website in-house. Agencies were expensive, retainers felt open-ended, and every change-request seemed to arrive with an invoice attached. Website builders were getting easier. Surely it was cheaper to just do it yourself, or hire someone junior to look after it.

It was a reasonable bet at the time. It just hasn't aged well.

What most owners discovered is that a website is not a project you finish. It is an operating function, like accounts or logistics, that quietly demands attention every single week. Content needs updating. A campaign needs a landing page. Something breaks. Google changes how it ranks things. A form stops sending. Someone notices the opening hours have been wrong since Easter.

The cost never disappeared. It just moved somewhere harder to see.

Agencies are expensive, and they are honest about it

Traditional agencies do genuinely good work, and there is nothing dishonest about their pricing. A big studio with designers, developers, SEO specialists, and project managers on payroll has real costs to cover, and those costs get passed on.

But the traditional model has two features that small businesses find hard to live with:

• Project-shaped billing. You pay a large sum for a build, then the relationship goes quiet until the next large sum. Your website slowly drifts out of date between projects.
• The change request tax. Small jobs carry disproportionate overhead. A twenty-minute text change becomes a scoped, quoted, scheduled piece of work, and by the time it lands, the moment has passed.

So owners either overspend on projects they didn't need, or underspend and let the site rot. Neither is good economics.

What in-house actually costs, in full

Here is where the in-house myth comes apart. The salary is the number people budget for. It is rarely more than two-thirds of the real figure.

Take a competent marketing and web coordinator on £32,000, which is modest for anyone who can genuinely handle content, campaigns, and basic site work.

• Salary: £32,000
• Employer National Insurance: roughly £4,000 at current UK rates
• Employer pension contributions: roughly £900 minimum
• Holiday, sick leave, and cover: 28 days of statutory leave is over 10% of the working year, and the work does not pause while they are away
• Equipment and workspace: laptop, phone, desk, insurance, typically £1,500–£2,500 in year one
• Software and tooling: design software, SEO platform, email marketing, analytics, scheduling, stock imagery. Realistically £2,000–£5,000 a year
• Recruitment: agency fees or your own time, commonly £3,000–£5,000 to fill the role
• Training and upskilling: the discipline changes every quarter, so this is not optional
• Management time: someone has to brief, review, and manage this person, and that someone is usually you

All in, that £32,000 role costs the business somewhere around £45,000 to £50,000 a year.

And here is the uncomfortable part: it still doesn't cover the job. One generalist cannot credibly be your designer, your front-end developer, your SEO specialist, your accessibility auditor, your performance engineer, your campaign strategist, and your security patcher. When something falls outside their range, you pay a contractor on top. When they leave, the knowledge leaves with them and you start again.

The line item nobody puts in the spreadsheet

Most small business websites are not managed by a hire at all. They are managed by the owner, at 9pm, after the actual work is done.

This feels free. It is the most expensive option on the table.

If your time is worth £75 an hour to the business (conservative for most owners, directors, and skilled proprietors) and you spend five hours a week on website, content, and marketing admin, that is £19,500 a year of your own capacity spent on work you are not particularly fast at.

Worse, it is the wrong five hours. Those hours could have gone into winning work, serving clients, training your team, improving margins, or the specific thing that only you can do. A plumber's most profitable hour is not the one spent fighting an image crop. A solicitor's is not the one spent guessing at meta descriptions. A practice owner's is not the one spent trying to remember how the booking form was set up.

You can absolutely keep managing it yourself. The question is not whether you are capable. It is whether it is the best possible use of the most expensive hour in your business.

What Aliora Managed Services actually is

Aliora Managed Services is the always-on alternative: one predictable monthly figure that covers the website and everything that keeps it earning.

That means:

• The site itself — built on a modern headless architecture with Sanity as the content layer, served from a global edge network, fast by design and built to convert rather than just exist
• Hosting, security, SSL, and infrastructure — handled as a matter of course, including the certificate renewals that are about to get significantly more frequent
• Content updates — new pages, revised copy, seasonal changes, price updates, new team members, new locations
• Campaigns and landing pages — spun up when you need them, not quoted and queued
• SEO and GEO — technical SEO, structured data, and the work that makes your site legible to AI search and generative answer engines, which is where a growing share of discovery now happens
• Performance and accessibility — Core Web Vitals, page speed, and standards compliance monitored continuously
• Analytics and reporting — so you can see what is actually working
• Ongoing growth plans — a rolling programme of improvements, so the site gets measurably better every month instead of ageing until the next rebuild

One monthly figure. No project cycle. No change request tax. No rebuild every three years because the site was left to drift.

What you are not paying for

This is the part that tends to land hardest with owners, because these are the costs that never appear in an agency proposal or a job advert.

With a managed service, there is:

• No salary
• No employer National Insurance
• No pension contributions
• No holiday pay, sick pay, or maternity cover
• No recruitment fees or interview time
• No laptop, phone, desk, or insurance
• No software licences to stack up and renew
• No training budget for a discipline that reinvents itself annually
• No line management, appraisals, or HR admin
• No single point of failure when one person resigns
• No redundancy risk if the workload changes

You get the capability without the employment. And critically, you get a team rather than a person: designers, developers, SEO specialists, and content people, all of whom are already up to speed on your site.

One email address, and a named Service Lead

The operational side is deliberately unglamorous, because that is what makes it cheap to run and easy to use.

You get one email address and a support tracker. Send the request, see where it is, see when it is done. No portals to learn, no forms to fill in, no chasing.

Behind that, you get a named Service Lead: a real person who knows your business, your site, and your priorities. Not an account manager, not a client services layer, not someone whose job is to sit between you and the work. Your Service Lead is the person who makes sure the work happens and tells you straight when something is or isn't worth doing.

That distinction matters commercially. Traditional agency structures carry a management layer that you fund whether you use it or not. Aliora doesn't have one to pay for, which is a large part of why the monthly figure is what it is.

You keep control, because it is built on Sanity

A fair objection to any managed service is the fear of being locked out of your own website. It is a real risk with page builders and proprietary platforms, and it is worth taking seriously.

Aliora sites are built on Sanity, which changes the dynamic completely:

• Your content is yours, structured and portable, accessible through an open API rather than trapped in a template
• You can edit it yourself whenever you want to. Log in, change the copy, publish. No ticket required for the things you would rather just do
• You can hand it to anyone. Sanity is a widely adopted, well-documented platform, not a bespoke system only one supplier understands
• The content and the design are separate, so a future redesign does not mean rebuilding everything from scratch

So it is not either/or. Keep doing the bits you enjoy and hand over the bits that eat your evenings. Most clients start by handing over everything, then take back the small content edits once they realise how straightforward it is.

The comparison, side by side

For a small business that needs a website, content updates, campaigns, SEO, and support:

In-house hire: £45,000–£50,000 a year fully loaded, with gaps in specialist skills and a single point of failure.

Traditional agency: a £15,000–£40,000 build, then either a substantial retainer or a slow decline punctuated by change request invoices.

Owner-managed: apparently free, realistically £15,000–£20,000 a year in diverted owner capacity, plus tooling, plus the compounding cost of things being left undone.

Aliora Managed Services: from £195 a month, all-inclusive, with growth plans that improve the site continuously and a named Service Lead who knows your business.

Even at the upper end of a growth plan, you are comparing a monthly figure to an annual payroll commitment. It is not a close contest.

Who this genuinely suits

Managed services works best for businesses that:

• Have a website that matters commercially but no one whose actual job is looking after it
• Are tired of the choice between expensive projects and doing nothing
• Want predictable monthly costs rather than unpredictable invoices
• Would rather their owners and senior people spent their time on fee-earning work
• Want to stay current on SEO, AI search, performance, and security without becoming experts in any of it

It is a poorer fit if you already have a full in-house digital team, or if your website is genuinely incidental to how you win work. We will tell you that rather than sell you something you don't need.

The bottom line

In-house was supposed to be the cheap option. In practice it means a salary plus employer National Insurance plus pension plus software plus recruitment plus management time, and still not enough specialist coverage to do the job properly.

Doing it yourself is cheaper on paper and more expensive in reality, because it is funded out of the single most valuable resource your business has: your attention.

Aliora Managed Services replaces all of it with a monthly figure, an email address, a support tracker, and a Service Lead who knows your name. Your website gets better every month. Your evenings come back. And you get to spend your time on the work you are actually brilliant at.

That is not a compromise. It is just better arithmetic.