Selling fixed-price design and marketing packages online: productised services for small UK studios
How a small UK studio turns quoted work into fixed-price packages: scoping, the business-to-business rules, VAT, card against invoice, and selling each package as a bookable kick-off on your own site. Checked 8 November 2026.
This guide is for a UK freelancer or small creative, marketing, web or consulting studio, one to eight people, that quotes every job by hand and wants to sell fixed-price packages from its own website. Those packages are productised services: a brand sprint, a logo pack, a website audit, a landing page, a day of design time. The guide covers scoping a package so it can carry a price, selling to businesses rather than consumers, VAT and late payment, card against invoice, and how a package is sold on Orbit, which we build, so weigh those parts with that in mind. Every figure was checked against its source on 8 November 2026.
In short
- A productised service is a fixed scope at a fixed price, sold from a page like a product: fewer proposals, a quicker yes.
- The scope carries the price: what is in, what is out, rounds of changes, usual turnaround and what the client supplies.
- Business buyers have no 14-day cancellation right; the late payment rules (8% over base rate, 30 days by default) and your own terms apply. Design work carries 20% VAT once registered; registration is compulsory past £90,000.
- On Orbit a package is a bookable service: the client books the kick-off and pays in full at checkout; bespoke work comes in through an enquiry form; a staged payment is a draft order sent as a payment link.
- Orbit Solo is £25 a month ex VAT (£19 a month billed yearly), 14-day free trial, no card.
What is a productised service, and why do studios sell them?
A productised service is a piece of work with a fixed scope, a fixed price and a usual turnaround, sold from a page the way a shop sells a product; bespoke work needs a call, a proposal and a wait. Studios sell them for three reasons. There are fewer proposals to write, and a proposal for a £2,000 job can take half a day and earns nothing if it loses. The yes comes faster, because a price on a page can be approved without a meeting. And delivery is predictable, because a job done twenty times has known hours and margin.
The subscription design studios made the idea famous. Designjoy charges $4,995 a month for one request at a time with an average 48-hour turnaround (designjoy.co, checked 8 November 2026). Penji lists $995 a month for two active projects and $1,995 for three (penji.co, checked 8 November 2026). Design Pickle no longer publishes a price; its page says flat-rate, quarterly or annual billing, set on a call (designpickle.com, checked 8 November 2026). All bill in US dollars. What they sell is a scope (“one request at a time”, “1 day turnaround”), not hours. A small UK studio does not need a subscription to borrow that: selling three or four one-off packages at a published price, beside the bespoke work you still quote, is the freelancing route in our guide to making money online in the UK.
How do you scope a package so it can carry a fixed price?
A price only holds if the scope does; every package page needs five statements.
- What is in, counted. “Three logo routes, one developed, files in SVG, PNG and PDF” can be ticked off; “a new brand” cannot.
- What is out, especially what a client assumes: no guidelines document, stationery or social templates? Say so, and point to the package that has them.
- Rounds of changes. A round is one consolidated set of comments from one named person; say how many are included and what another costs. “Unlimited revisions” turns a fixed price back into an hourly one.
- Turnaround, as “usually”, with what starts the clock: payment, the kick-off and the client’s materials all received.
- What the client supplies, and by when: brief answers, copy, photographs, logins and one decision-maker.
Add who owns the work (usually the rights pass on final payment) and what happens if a client goes quiet. Three example packages, with illustrative prices:
| Package | What is in | What is out | Changes, timing and what the client supplies |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brand sprint, £2,400. Kick-off: a three-hour workshop, at the studio or by video | Positioning, name check, three logo routes, one developed, colour and type, logo files, a brand sheet | Guidelines document, stationery, social templates, website | Two rounds. Usually three to four weeks. Client supplies the brief questionnaire and one decision-maker |
| Website audit, £650. Kick-off: a 45-minute call | Up to 15 pages reviewed, speed and mobile checks, a report with fixes in priority order, a walkthrough call | Making the fixes, new copy, keyword research | Usually ten working days. Client supplies analytics access and what the site is for |
| Landing page, £1,800. Kick-off: a 90-minute call | Wireframe, design, build on the client’s platform, an edit of their draft copy, one form, search title and description | Copy from scratch, photography, advertising | Two rounds. Usually three weeks after copy and images arrive. Client supplies draft copy, images and login |
How is a fixed-price package sold from your own website?
The package is a bookable service, and the booking is the kick-off
On Orbit a service is a product type with a duration, places per slot, a notice period, a gap between bookings and an optional cancellation fee. A package is a service whose booking is its kick-off. The page shows the price and the scope; the client picks a date and time for the kick-off, pays the full price at checkout, and the booking lands on your Bookings calendar as Confirmed when the payment goes through. “At the studio” and “by video call” are variants of one service at the same price; each package is its own service, because the kick-off length (45 minutes for the audit, three hours for the brand sprint) belongs to the product. The client gets a confirmation email, and My Bookings in their account lets them reschedule into free slots over the next 30 days, cancel with the refund shown first, or download a calendar file (bookings).
Studio time, enquiries and the site
A 45-minute clinic, a website care hour and a design day (one eight-hour slot) are further services with one place per slot; block time when you are away and nobody can book or reschedule into it. Free first chats, quotes and large projects come in as enquiries. The page builder’s contact form lands in your dashboard inbox and your email, so “Send us a brief” is a form; the Form Builder plugin adds custom fields and file uploads. Case studies are pages in the page builder: an image gallery or before-and-after block and a paragraph on the brief and the outcome, with a process-steps block, testimonials and an FAQ under the packages. Printed workbooks or prints are ordinary physical products, in the same shop and orders list as a booked kick-off.
Staged payments, retainers and your terms
- A package booked online is paid in full at checkout. For a bigger job billed in stages, take it through the enquiry form, agree the stages in your terms, then raise a draft order for each stage. For each one, send the payment link (it works for 7 days), email a payment-due invoice, or mark the order paid when the bank transfer lands (orders, every plan).
- A retainer is a subscription product: a recurring charge on a weekly to yearly plan that customers pause, resume or cancel from their account, with the hours and deliverables set out in your terms. A simple two-hours-a-month plan runs that way; a retainer that needs tracked time or sign-off is invoiced from your accounts software.
- Your terms live on a page linked from every package, and bespoke proposals are written and signed with the tool you use today.
Do consumer rules apply when your clients are businesses?
Mostly not. The Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 give a distance buyer 14 days to cancel, but they protect a “consumer”: “an individual acting for purposes which are wholly or mainly outside that individual’s trade, business, craft or profession” (legislation.gov.uk, regulation 4, checked 8 November 2026). A company or a sole trader buying for their business is a trader, so the 14-day right does not apply. Sales to individuals are consumer sales: gov.uk says you must tell them they can cancel and give set information before they order (gov.uk, online and distance selling, checked 8 November 2026).
Business clients get your own terms and the late payment legislation. With no payment date agreed, a payment is late 30 days after the invoice or the service, whichever is later; agreed terms between businesses can run to 60 days, and public authorities must pay within 30 (gov.uk, late commercial payments, checked 8 November 2026). On a late business debt you can charge statutory interest at 8% plus the Bank of England base rate (gov.uk, charging interest). You can also claim a fixed recovery sum of £40 on a debt under £1,000, £70 on a debt of £1,000 to £9,999.99 and £100 on a debt of £10,000 or more, plus reasonable costs (gov.uk, debt recovery costs), both checked 8 November 2026.
The Commercial Payments Bill, introduced to Parliament in May 2026 and still a bill when we checked, would cap terms at 60 days for large firms paying smaller suppliers and make interest at 8% over base rate mandatory. The government puts late payment at £11 billion a year and 38 closures a day (gov.uk, Commercial Payments Bill overview and press release, 19 May 2026, checked 8 November 2026). None of this is legal advice: have a solicitor read your terms once.
Do you charge VAT on design and marketing services?
Yes, once you are VAT registered. The standard rate of 20% applies to “most goods and services” (gov.uk, VAT rates, checked 8 November 2026), design, marketing and web work included. You must register when your taxable turnover for the last 12 months goes over £90,000, or you expect it to in the next 30 days (gov.uk, when to register, checked 8 November 2026); below that you can register voluntarily or stay out, charging no VAT and reclaiming none.
A VAT-registered business can reclaim VAT on items bought for the business if it holds valid VAT invoices (gov.uk, reclaim VAT, checked 8 November 2026), so to that client £2,400 plus VAT costs £2,400; to a start-up below the threshold it costs £2,880. If most clients are registered, show prices ex VAT; if many are small, show the price with VAT inside. On Orbit that is a setting in Settings, Tax, and once your VAT number is on file every paid order gets a VAT invoice emailed the moment the payment is captured; without a number the client gets a plain invoice (payouts and VAT). Downloads follow different rules; our guide to selling digital products, subscriptions and services covers them. Agree anything unusual with your accountant.
Card at checkout or an invoice: which gets you paid faster?
A card payment at checkout arrives before the work starts, and approving and paying is one step for the client. Its cost is the card rate: on Solo a UK personal Visa or Mastercard is 2% + 25p and a UK business or corporate card is 3.3% + 25p, with nothing added on top; both fall on Team and Pro (pricing, checked 8 November 2026). On a business card that is £79.45 on a £2,400 brand sprint, against £48.25 on a personal card. An invoice costs nothing to send, waits 30 days plus the chasing, and the work starts before the money arrives. A payment link from a draft order, paid within 7 days through the same Stripe step, sits between the two and suits a client whose procurement cannot buy from a page.
Card payments reach your bank on the payout schedule Stripe sets, with every fee itemised in your payout history. The Xero and QuickBooks Online plugins send each paid order to your accounts as a sales invoice with its payment, and each refund as a credit note or refund receipt, against the accounts and VAT rates you map once. Our bookkeeping guide has the method if you keep the books by hand.
Where Orbit fits
Everything above runs on Orbit’s Solo plan at £25 a month ex VAT, or £19 a month billed yearly, with a 14-day free trial and no card. Service products and the Bookings calendar, draft orders with payment links, VAT invoices and payouts, the page builder and a blog are on every plan; the Xero, QuickBooks and Form Builder plugins come from the plugin store. Solo has one staff account, so a studio where two or more people need the dashboard is on Team at £85 a month (£64 a month billed yearly), with ten seats. The theme store lists free and premium themes by industry; pick one for a studio or consultancy and change its colours, fonts and logo in the dashboard. This post is part of our series on selling services online in the UK; the bookings, orders, finance and page builder pages have the detail.
Read next: selling IT support as monthly plans, taking phone orders and deposits with a payment link and quote forms and price calculators for a trade website.
Questions people ask about productised services
What is a productised service?
A piece of work with a fixed scope, a fixed price and a usual turnaround, sold from a page the way a product is. A £2,400 brand sprint with three logo routes, two rounds of changes and a three-hour kick-off is one; “branding, price on application” is not.
How do I bill a package in stages on Orbit?
A package booked on the site is paid in full at checkout, and the booking is confirmed when the payment goes through. For a job billed in stages, take it through the enquiry form, agree the stages in your terms, and raise a draft order for each stage with a payment link that works for 7 days or a payment-due invoice.
Do business clients get a 14-day cooling-off period?
Not under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013, which protect an individual acting wholly or mainly outside their trade, business, craft or profession (legislation.gov.uk, checked 8 November 2026). A company or a sole trader buying for their business is a trader, so your own terms govern cancellation. Sales to individuals are consumer sales and the right applies.
Do I charge VAT on design and marketing work?
Once you are VAT registered, yes, at the standard rate of 20% (gov.uk, checked 8 November 2026). Registration is compulsory when your taxable turnover for the last 12 months passes £90,000 or you expect it to in the next 30 days. A VAT-registered client can reclaim the VAT you charge; one who is not registered cannot, so to them it is a real cost.
Can I sell a monthly retainer through my website?
Yes, as a subscription product: a recurring charge on a weekly to yearly plan that the customer can pause, resume or cancel from their account, with the hours and deliverables set out in your terms. A simple “two hours a month” plan runs that way; a retainer that needs tracked time or sign-off is invoiced from your accounts software.
If you have three jobs you quote the same way every time, you have three packages: write the scope lines, price each one and sell the kick-off. The 14-day free trial, no card required, is long enough to set up the services and book one yourself.