Your agency charged you to change a phone number on your own site

Why agencies charge for tiny edits

Agencies make money two ways: monthly retainers and billable work on top. The retainer covers hosting and the vague promise of looking after the site. Anything that needs a human to actually open the site and type something gets logged as billable.

So a phone number change - which takes less time than reading the invoice for it - becomes a £30 or £45 line item. Some agencies have a minimum billing block of half an hour, which means a 90-second edit costs you 30 minutes at their rate.

The other reason this happens: the person doing the work is not the person you spoke to. Your email goes to an account manager, who logs a ticket, which gets passed to a developer, who does the edit, then it gets reviewed, then it gets pushed live. Five people touching one phone number is genuinely expensive, and you are paying for all of them.

What a phone number change actually takes

On a normal small business website, changing a phone number means finding it in the site files - usually in the header, the footer, and maybe a contact page - and replacing the old number with the new one. For a developer who knows the site, this is under two minutes of actual work.

If the site uses a content management system (a tool that lets you edit text through a web browser, like editing a Word document), it is even quicker. Log in, find the field, type the new number, save.

The work is not hard. The work is not skilled. The work is not worth £45. The work is worth being part of what you already pay every month.

What your retainer should already cover

If you are paying a monthly fee for someone to look after your website, small text changes belong inside that fee. That includes:

• Phone numbers, email addresses, postal addresses
• Opening hours and bank holiday notices
• Staff names, prices on a basic services page, small typo fixes
• Swapping out a photo for a new one of the same size

None of these are projects. None of them need scoping calls or quotes. They are five-minute jobs that should be done the same day you ask for them.

Where a charge does make sense: building a new page, restructuring navigation, adding a booking system, changing the design, anything that needs design decisions or testing. There is a clear line between maintaining a site and developing it - good providers respect that line and bill accordingly.

How to push back on the invoice

You can refuse to pay it, but that gets messy and you still have the same agency afterwards. A better approach is to email them and ask three direct questions:

• What does my monthly retainer cover, in writing?
• Why is a text change on a site I already pay for billed separately?
• What is the smallest change that is included in the retainer?

If they cannot give you a clear written answer, you have your answer. A retainer that excludes everything except hosting is not a maintenance retainer - it is a hosting bill with extra words. The phrase "website maintenance" on an invoice does not legally mean anything specific.

How to stop paying per edit

Switch to a provider whose pricing covers small edits as standard. That is what a retainer is meant to be. You pay a flat fee each month, and small changes are included up to a sensible cap - usually around ten a month, which most small businesses never come close to using.

SkipTheAgency's Maintained plan is £65/month and covers up to ten content changes a month - phone numbers, addresses, opening hours, prices, swapped photos, all of it. No tickets, no extra invoices, no half-hour minimum billing on a two-minute job. If you only need hosting and the odd change, the Hosted plan at £40/month covers up to three changes a month and works out cheaper than most agency hosting on its own.

Whether you run a takeaway in Cardiff or a clinic in Edinburgh, the test is the same: ask any provider in writing what a phone number change costs. If the answer is anything other than "it is included," keep looking.