Alwan TechnologiesMost of what we build for trades has a calculator in it. For extensions and loft conversions, we usually argue against one.
An extension is not a product. The price moves on footprint, glazing, ground conditions, whether the kitchen relocates into it, whether the drains are where the drawings say, and what the structural engineer comes back with. A form that returns a confident figure from four dropdowns is not pricing the job. It is guessing, and the customer finds out it was a guess at exactly the moment you would least like them to — when your real number arrives.
So the instant quote is the wrong tool here. That does not mean the page gets to say nothing about money.
Publish ranges, label them honestly
There is a large gap between quoting a job and refusing to discuss cost at all, and almost every builder's website sits at the wrong end of it.
The useful middle is a published guide: typical ranges by project type, with a line under each explaining what puts a job at the bottom of the range and what puts it at the top. A rooflight loft conversion and a full dormer with an en-suite are not the same job, and saying so is more convincing than either a single number or silence.
Two things make this work rather than backfire. The ranges have to be labelled as guide figures, clearly, not buried in small print. And they have to be yours — real brackets from work you have actually done, not numbers lifted off a national average. The extensions example on our showcase does this: a labelled cost guide, no instant quote anywhere on the page, and an enquiry flow instead.
Qualify instead of calculating
If the site is not producing a price, the enquiry form has a different job: sorting the people worth ringing back today from the people who are eighteen months and a planning application away.
Project type, rough stage — idea, drawings done, planning granted — a budget band, and when they want to start. Four questions, none of them intrusive, and the enquiry that reaches your phone tells you whether to call now or in the spring. That is worth more to a builder than a fabricated number, because the constraint on a good builder is rarely leads. It is which leads are real.
Show the work properly
This is where most builders' sites are weakest, and it is the easiest thing to fix.
A grid of untitled photos proves very little. The same photos with the street or area, the size, how long it took, and two lines about what was awkward about it are a different thing entirely — they are checkable, and they read like a firm that remembers its own jobs. If you have permission to name the road, name it. If you do not, the area and the postcode district are enough.
Do this for three jobs properly rather than twelve badly. Someone weighing up a fifty-thousand-pound decision reads one case study closely; they do not scroll a gallery.
What it costs
Right now that is £99 to build and £35 a month to run — about £8 a week. That is a launch price for the first ten trades who take it, not a standing rate, and the site and the domain are in your name from the day it goes live rather than after some qualifying period.
For this kind of work the build is usually the cost guide, the qualifying enquiry, and the case studies done properly — rather than a calculator. We would rather talk you out of the calculator than sell you one that misprices your work.