I'm a US citizen and my partner is a UK citizen. We used Migrate's DYI Application pack to apply for my partner visa without other support from a lawyer. Their checklist and pack was extremely helpful and well worth the money. We ordered the pack in January, filed on February 1st 2021, paid for the priority processing and received my approval on March 19th 2021. Without the pack I expect that my visa probably would have been denied. There are a ton of supporting documents that the DIY pack pointed out which the gov.uk site doesn't mention. Their service makes it realistically achievable to apply without having to pay a lawyer thousands for a full service application handling. If you are detail oriented and thorough it's extremely possible to do the application yourself with the help of the Migrate DIY pack. One personal piece of advice on the cash savings route. While we still got approved we overcomplicated it by having our savings in two accounts with one in dollars (an American Bank) and the other in GBP (Wise, formerly Transferwise) and almost got screwed into having to wait another month because of the exchange rate flucuations. If I had it to do again I'd just have put it all in pounds in Transferwise rather than keeping some of our savings in dollars. The US banks can be pretty finicky about giving you the stamped statements and account ownership letters that are recommended, Wise will do it no problem.