The £7,500 website "grant" that wasn't

A £15,000 quote with a £7,500 grant attached

A client rang us last week to ask about a website quote their family business had received: £15,000, with a £7,500 grant covering half. Something felt off. It took us an afternoon to find out why.

The pitch is convincing. A friendly salesperson, a professional agency, and a grant scheme with its own polished website promising £1,200 to £12,500 towards a new site. Apply in 60 seconds, first come first served, response within 48 hours. All you pay is "your half".

We looked into the grant body. Here is what the public record shows.

What the website's own code told us

This is where it stopped being a grey area. The grant body's website was built on the web agency's own in-house website theme — the agency's name is literally written through the site's source code — and both websites sit on the same hosting server, two IP addresses apart.

The "independent" grant scheme and the agency its grants get spent with are, at minimum, built and hosted by the same people.

The frustrating part: real grants exist

South Yorkshire businesses can currently get genuine 50% match funding — £2,500 to £12,499 — for digitisation projects through the Business Productivity & Digitisation Grant, run by the four local councils and the Mayoral Combined Authority, funded by the UK Shared Prosperity Fund. Doncaster businesses go through Business Doncaster on 01302 735555. It is real money, and schemes like it exist across most of the country through local growth hubs.

How to tell the difference in thirty seconds:

• Real grants come from your council, growth hub, or gov.uk. And they never arrive bundled with one specific supplier. You choose your own agency.
• Real applications get scrutinised. They take weeks, ask hard questions, and can be rejected. A "60-second application" approved in 48 hours is a sales funnel, not a grant.
• Real funders answer the phone. A grant body with no phone line, one director, and a two-year-old company registration deserves five minutes on Companies House before you sign.