What a small business website actually costs

1. Do it yourself on a template — $0 to $50 a month

Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy. The subscription is genuinely cheap and the editors are genuinely good now. This is the right answer for a lot of businesses and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

What it actually costs is your time. A decent template site is somewhere between fifteen and forty hours the first time you do it — choosing, writing, fighting the editor, redoing the mobile layout, discovering that the photos you have are the wrong shape. If your hourly rate is anything at all, price that in honestly.

The second cost is that it will look like a template, because it is one. For some businesses that genuinely does not matter. For a business whose competitor is one tap away in the same map result, it does.

2. A freelancer — $1,500 to $8,000, once

A single person builds the thing and hands it over. The range is wide because the phrase covers a student on a marketplace and a designer with fifteen years of work behind them.

The build cost is not the number to watch. The number to watch is what happens in month four, when you want the hours changed and the freelancer has a full-time job now. Most small business sites do not die from bad design. They die from nobody being responsible for them.

Before you hire anyone one-off, ask exactly one question: what happens when I need a change in six months, and what does it cost? An answer that is vague now will be more vague then.

3. An agency — $8,000 to $60,000, plus retainer

Strategy, discovery, design system, staged build, the works. Genuinely worth it above a certain size, and genuinely absurd below it.

The thing to understand is that a large part of an agency fee pays for coordination — account managers, project managers, the meetings where those people talk to each other. That overhead is real and it buys real reliability at scale. If you are one location with forty pages of nothing, you are paying for a process built for a client fifty times your size.

4. A monthly plan — $150 to $2,500 a month

The build is included, or free, and you pay monthly for the site plus some ongoing work. This is what we do, so read the next paragraph with that in mind.

The honest trade: you spend more over three years than you would on a one-off build, and in exchange you never have a $6,000 quarter and never have to find somebody when something breaks. Whether that is a good deal depends entirely on whether the ongoing work is real. A plan that is really just hosting with a nice name is a bad deal at any price.

The question that separates the two: what specifically happens in a month where I ask for nothing? If the answer is "we keep it online", that is hosting, and hosting costs about $10.

The costs nobody quotes

These land after you have signed, on every route above.

• Photography — the single biggest quality difference between two sites at the same price. Budget $400 to $1,500, or plan to shoot it properly on a phone in good light.
• Copy. Most quotes assume you will write it. Most people do not write it, which is the number one reason builds stall for months.
• The domain, $10 to $20 a year, and renewing it. Losing a domain to a lapsed card is more common than it should be.
• Email on your own domain. Often free, frequently forgotten, and a gmail address on a $200-an-hour trade quietly costs you work.
• Changes. Ask what a text edit costs before you need one.

So what should you spend?

Work out what one customer is worth to you over a year. For a plumber that might be $600. For a gym on a membership, $900. For a contractor, several thousand.

Now ask how many extra customers a year the site needs to bring in to pay for itself. If the answer is one or two, the decision is not close and the exact price barely matters. If the answer is thirty, no website is going to fix that and the problem is somewhere else.

If you want a specific number for your business rather than a range, tell us about it and we'll build you a free design first — you see it before you pay anything.