It is the question everyone asks second, right after working out they need a plan at all. And the answers online are unhelpfully vague, largely because the honest answer is that a business plan can cost you nothing or it can cost you five thousand pounds, and both can be the right decision.
What follows is what the UK market actually charges, what pushes a quote up, and how to work out which end of the range your situation belongs at.
The price ranges, plainly
| Option | Typical UK cost | Best suited to |
|---|---|---|
| Free templates and guides | £0 | Testing an idea, or a plan only you will read |
| Business plan software | £20 – £50 a month | You have the knowledge but not the financial modelling |
| Freelance writer | £300 – £1,500 | A straightforward plan, modest funding ask |
| Specialist consultancy | £1,500 – £5,000 | Bank or investor funding, complex business |
| Immigration or investor-grade | £2,000 – £10,000+ | Visa applications, equity raises, regulated sectors |
Those bands overlap and there are outliers at both ends. But if a quote lands well outside them, it is worth asking what accounts for the difference — in either direction.
What actually drives the price
Quotes vary by a factor of ten for the same nominal deliverable, and it is rarely about the writing. Four things move the number.
Who is going to read it. A plan for your own use is a different document from one going to a bank credit committee, and both are different from one going to the Home Office. The audience sets the standard of evidence, and evidence is the expensive part. A lender’s plan needs comparable market data, a sensitivity analysis and defensible assumptions. Your own plan needs you to be honest with yourself.
How much of the financial modelling is included. This is the biggest single variable, and the one most often glossed over in a quote. A twenty-page narrative with a summary table costs a fraction of the same narrative backed by a monthly cash flow, a break-even analysis, three-year projections and a downside case. Ask explicitly what financial work is in scope. “Financial projections included” can mean anything.
How much of the thinking you have already done. If you arrive with your pricing settled, your costs listed and your market understood, a writer is formatting and sharpening. If you arrive with an idea, they are doing the strategy work too, and that is consultancy time rather than writing time. Turning up prepared genuinely reduces what you pay.
The sector. Regulated sectors cost more because the writer has to understand the regime. A nursery plan needs Ofsted registration and statutory staff ratios built into the forecast; a property development appraisal needs build costs, a finance structure and a profit-on-cost figure a lender will test; a cafe or restaurant plan needs licensing and the VAT split between eat-in and takeaway. Generalists either decline these or price the learning curve into the quote.
Why free templates cost more than they look
A template is free and it will produce something plan-shaped. For testing an idea on a page, that is genuinely fine, and there is no reason to spend money at that stage.
The difficulty arrives when the plan has a job to do. Templates give you headings, not numbers, and the numbers are what get examined. A lender reads the cash flow before the narrative, and a template cannot tell you whether your VAT position is modelled correctly, whether employer National Insurance is in the wage bill, or whether your break-even point is where you think it is. Most rejected applications are not rejected on prose.
So the real cost of a free template is not zero. It is the time you spend building financials in a spreadsheet you are not sure about, plus the risk of an avoidable decline.
When paying someone is the right call
There are four situations where a written service is usually worth the money, and it is worth being clear that they are specific rather than universal.
The stakes are high relative to the fee. Borrowing £200,000 against your house, or applying for a visa where a refusal costs you the application fee and a year, changes the maths. A £2,000 plan against a £200,000 decision is cheap insurance.
A regulator or a formal process is involved. Immigration, CQC, Ofsted, franchise approval. These have conventions, and someone who has been through them repeatedly will get it right first time.
You genuinely do not have the time. A plan built properly is thirty to fifty hours of work. If those hours are worth more spent on customers, outsourcing is a straightforward commercial decision rather than an admission of anything.
The financials are beyond you and you know it. There is no shame here. Cash flow modelling, tax treatment and break-even analysis are a skill. Getting them wrong in a document a bank will scrutinise is worse than paying someone.
When it is not
Equally, there are situations where paying a writer is money badly spent.
If you are still deciding whether to do this at all, a plan you did not write will not help you decide. The value of the exercise at that stage is entirely in doing it yourself and discovering what you do not know.
If you will have to defend the numbers in an interview — and for a bank loan or Start Up Loan you will — a plan you commissioned puts you in the position of explaining someone else’s reasoning under questioning. Assessors notice.
And if the plan needs updating every quarter as the business finds its shape, a document you cannot edit yourself becomes stale within months, and you pay again.
The middle option most people miss
The framing is usually “write it myself or pay someone”, which skips the option that suits the largest group of people: you know your business better than any writer will, but you are not confident with the financial modelling.
Software closes exactly that gap. You answer questions about your sales, costs, staffing and funding, and the projections, cash flow, break-even analysis and UK tax calculations are built from your answers. SquarePlan costs £39.99 a month with no minimum term, so a plan finished in a month costs under forty pounds — and because you built it, you can defend every figure in it and change it when the business changes.
That said, it is not the answer for everyone, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. If your plan is going to the Home Office, or you are raising equity, or you simply do not have thirty hours, then you want a person. Our own writing service is quoted bespoke — a chartered accountant scopes what your plan actually needs and prices it accordingly, so get in touch for a figure rather than working from anyone’s list price, ours included. But the honest comparison is the one above, not a sales pitch.
Questions worth asking before you accept a quote
Whoever you are considering, these five questions separate a fair price from a bad one.
- What financial work is included? Specifically: monthly cash flow, break-even, three-year projections, sensitivity analysis. Get it itemised.
- How many revisions? Unlimited revisions and “one round of amendments” are very different products at the same headline price.
- Who is actually writing it? Some firms sell on a named consultant and deliver via an offshore writing team. That is not automatically bad, but you should know.
- Do you have sector experience? Ask for an example in your sector, redacted.
- Do I get the underlying financial model? If you only receive a PDF, you cannot update it, and you will be back next year.
The bottom line
Match the spend to the job. A plan for your own thinking should cost you time, not money. A plan for a £25,000 Start Up Loan sits comfortably in software territory. A plan supporting a visa application or a substantial equity raise justifies a professional, and trying to save money there is a false economy.
What you should not do is pay four figures for a document you will file and never look at again. The plan that earns its cost is the one you actually use.