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About
About WillSum
An independent, figures-first guide to what wills and probate cost. No forms, nothing to sell, and no reader's details collected or passed on.
WillSum is an independent information site about what wills, probate and powers of attorney cost in the United Kingdom. It is not a law firm, not a will writer, not a probate practitioner, and not paid to send you anywhere. It exists to put the figures in one place with the receipts attached.
How the figures are made
- Every figure is read from the body that sets it, or from a firm's own published page, quoted word for word and stamped with the day we read it.
- Statutory fees come from the court, the registry or the fees order. Tax thresholds come from the revenue service's own table. A comparison site is never a source, and neither is a brief we were handed.
- England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are held apart. Every fee and threshold carries the nation it belongs to, and the build refuses one that does not.
- Where we have done the arithmetic, the page says so beside the number rather than dressing it up as published.
- A figure we cannot verify is left out, and so is a firm's row where the firm publishes no price we can stand behind. A gap beats a guess.
- Every figure is open data at /api/metrics.json, with its source and the dates it was read and is due a re-read.
How we check them, and what happens when a firm is wrong
Every figure carries two dates: the day we read its source and the day it is next due a read. Both are printed beside the figure and both are in the open feed, so you can see how fresh a number is without taking our word for it.
Where a firm's own page states a statutory fee, we record the firm's figure alongside ours and the build compares them every time it runs. That is why the count of out-of-date court fees on this site is recomputed rather than remembered, and why it will correct itself the day a firm updates its page. Where a firm and the official source disagree, the official source wins. We do not call anybody dishonest for a stale line, and we do not quietly drop the finding either.
The line we will not cross
People arrive at a probate page on the worst week of their life. So there is no urgency on this site, no countdown, no manufactured deadline and no implication that something terrible happens if you take a fortnight to think. Every probate page opens with the routes that cost nothing, because for a lot of estates that is the true answer, and the pages that tell you otherwise are usually the ones selling something.
The build enforces that rather than trusting it. Scare wording fails the build, in the data and on the page, and a page that cannot be written protectively and honestly does not get written.
Who is behind it
WillSum is a small independent project, not a company touting for your business. It makes its money, if it makes any, from ordinary advertising on the page, never from selling your details and never from a fee for passing you to a firm. Naming a firm as recommended, best or approved is not something we do, and the order of every table is alphabetical and never moves for money.
Privacy: we ask for nothing
There is no form anywhere on this site. No name, no email, no postcode, no telephone number, no account, no newsletter. We do not ask for your details, so we have nothing to store, share or sell. It is the plainest privacy position there is: we cannot lose what we never collect.
The whole policy, including the cookies Google's ads can set and how to turn them down, is on its own page: Privacy.