How much does a website actually cost?
Nobody in this industry likes answering this in public, which is exactly why every article about it is vague. Here are the real ranges, what moves them, and the three year number that matters more than the quote.
A small business website costs $500 to $5,000 from a freelancer, $3,000 to $10,000 from a small shop, and $10,000 to $40,000 from an agency. Monthly plans that bundle the build, hosting and support run $100 to $500 a month with nothing down, which is how most local businesses pay for one now. A DIY builder is $200 to $600 a year plus about 50 hours of your own time.
The ranges you will actually be quoted
Five ways to get a website exist, and they are not competing for the same customer even though they all show up in the same search. Here is what each one costs and, more usefully, what you are actually buying.
| How you get it | Cost | What you are really buying |
|---|---|---|
| Build it yourself | $200 to $600 / yr | A subscription and a set of templates. You are the designer, the writer, the photographer and the support desk. |
| Freelancer | $500 to $5,000 | One person's time, once. Quality swings wildly at this tier and so does whether they answer the phone in eight months. |
| Small shop | $3,000 to $10,000 | A custom design, real copywriting, and usually a person whose name you know. Most local businesses land here. |
| Full agency | $10,000 to $40,000 | A team, a strategy phase, and process. Worth it when the website is your main sales channel, not when it is your business card. |
| Monthly plan | $100 to $500 / mo | The build spread over time with hosting, domain, updates and edits folded in. No large upfront hit, no ownership of a finished asset unless the contract says so. |
Those ranges are wide on purpose, because the thing being sold is not standardised. A five page site for a lawn care company and a five page site for a regional HVAC company with four locations and an online booking system are both "a five page site". They are not the same job.
What actually moves the number
If you get three quotes and they come back at $1,800, $6,500 and $22,000, nobody is necessarily ripping you off. Ask about these five things and the spread usually explains itself.
1. Custom design or a template
A template is a design somebody else already made, resized to fit your logo. It is fast and it is cheap and it is why so many local sites look like each other. A custom design starts from your business and what your customers are actually deciding between. That difference is worth thousands, and it is the single biggest line item in most quotes.
2. Who writes the words
Almost every cheap quote assumes you will send over the copy. Almost every business owner then does not, and the project stalls for three months. Professional copywriting runs $100 to $500 a page. If a quote does not mention copy, it is not included, and you have just volunteered for a job you will hate.
3. Who takes the photos
Stock photos of models in hard hats are free and they cost you customers, because people can tell. Real photography runs $300 to $1,500 for a half day and it is usually the highest return line on the whole invoice. Phone photos taken well in good light are a legitimate middle path and a decent shop will tell you that.
4. What it has to connect to
A page with a phone number is simple. Online booking, payments, a customer portal, inventory, a quoting tool, a CRM handoff, any of those can double a quote on their own. Be honest about what you need on day one versus what sounds good in a meeting.
5. What happens after launch
This is the one that gets people. A $3,000 one time build does not include the person who fixes it when the contact form quietly stops sending in fourteen months. Ask what the hourly rate is, ask what the response time is, and ask both before you sign, not after.
Costs that are almost never in the quote
- Domain name: $12 to $20 a year, more if the one you want is being squatted.
- Hosting: $0 to $50 a month depending on how the site is built.
- Business email: roughly $7 a mailbox a month if you want you@yourbusiness.com instead of a Gmail address.
- Maintenance: plugin and platform updates, or the mess that follows when nobody does them.
- Edits: new prices, new staff, new hours. Usually billed hourly at $75 to $200.
- SSL certificate: free almost everywhere in 2026. If somebody is charging you for one, that tells you something about the rest of the invoice.
The number that actually matters is three years
Websites are not bought once. They are owned. Comparing the upfront quotes is the wrong comparison, and it is the comparison every web shop wants you to make, because a one time number always looks smaller than a monthly one.
So here is the same decision run over 36 months, which is roughly how long a small business site lasts before it needs replacing. These use middle of the range figures and assume a handful of edits a year, which every real business needs.
| Route | Upfront | Ongoing | Your hours | 3 year cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder | $0 | $23 / mo plan + domain | ~60 hrs | ~$900 |
| Freelancer, one time | $2,500 | $10 / mo hosting + ~$600 / yr in edits | ~12 hrs | ~$4,700 |
| Small shop, one time | $6,000 | $50 / mo care plan | ~6 hrs | ~$7,800 |
| Agency | $12,000 | $200 / mo retainer | ~20 hrs | ~$19,200 |
| Monthly plan at $150 | $0 | $150 / mo, everything included | ~4 hrs | ~$5,400 |
Two things fall out of that table, and neither of them is a pitch.
The first is that the cheapest row in dollars is the most expensive row in hours. A builder really will get a decent looking site up for under a thousand dollars over three years, and it will take you somewhere around sixty hours to do it. Price those hours at what you charge a customer and DIY stops being the cheap option somewhere around hour twenty. Those are also the hours you were going to spend selling.
The second is that the gap between a freelancer build and a monthly plan is much smaller than the upfront numbers suggest, and the gap between either of those and an agency is enormous. Most local businesses are really choosing between the middle three rows.
Which one is right for you
Most of the advice on this subject is written to funnel you into one answer. There are four real ones, roughly in the order they suit a working local business.
Take a monthly plan if the upfront number is the thing that has been stopping you, or if you already know from experience that you will not get around to maintaining it yourself. You are trading a bigger five year number for a site that is live next month and stays looked after. Read the contract on ownership and cancellation before you sign, and if a shop will not put those in writing, walk.
Hire a small shop if you can write the cheque and the website has real work to do: bringing in leads, taking bookings, explaining a service people do not understand yet. You are paying for judgement about what goes on the page, not for the page. Budget for the care plan too, because a site nobody maintains is a site that quietly breaks.
Hire a freelancer if you have a clear picture of what you want, you can write your own copy, and somebody you trust has actually seen their work. The risk at this tier is not quality, it is availability. Ask what happens in a year when you need a change, and get that answer in writing.
Build it yourself if you genuinely have more time than money and you need one or two pages. A one page site with your phone number, your services and your hours beats no site by a mile. Just be honest with yourself about the sixty hours. Most owners we talk to started a builder site, got three quarters of the way through it, and it has been sitting unfinished ever since.
What we charge
It would be strange to write all of that and not answer it for our own shop, so: $150 a month, nothing down, no contract. That covers the design, the build, hosting, the domain, security, backups, and edits when your prices or hours change. One number, month to month, cancel whenever.
We publish it because not publishing it is a tactic. When a web shop will not put a price on the page, it is usually so they can size you up first and quote accordingly. You can see the whole thing on our pricing page and some before and after builds if you want to know what $150 a month actually looks like.
We are also genuinely fine telling people they do not need us. If you are a one person operation with twelve customers and all of them came from your church, a website is not your next best dollar. Google Business Profile is, and that one is free. We wrote up how to do that yourself too.
- How much does a website cost per month?
- A DIY builder plan runs about $16 to $49 a month. A managed monthly plan from a web shop, where the build, hosting, domain and edits are all included, typically runs $100 to $500 a month. If you paid a one time fee for your site, budget $10 to $50 a month for hosting plus whatever you pay hourly when something needs changing.
- How much should a small business spend on a website?
- For most local service businesses with under ten pages, somewhere between $1,500 and $6,000 over three years is a sane range, whether that arrives as one invoice or as a monthly payment. Spending less usually means you are doing the work yourself. Spending much more only pays off if the site is your main sales channel.
- Why do web design quotes vary so much?
- Three things drive almost all of the spread: whether the design is custom or a template, who writes the words and takes the photos, and whether ongoing hosting, updates and support are included or billed separately. A $2,000 quote and a $20,000 quote are often for genuinely different amounts of work.
- Is it cheaper to build my own website?
- In dollars, yes. A builder plan is a few hundred dollars a year. The real cost is your time, usually 20 to 60 hours for a first site, plus every hour after that when something breaks or needs changing. If your time is worth more than about $40 an hour, DIY is rarely the cheaper option.
- Do I own my website if I pay monthly?
- It depends entirely on the shop, so get the answer in writing before you sign. Ask three specific questions: who is listed as the registrant on the domain, can you take the site files with you if you leave, and what happens to the site the month after you stop paying.
- Ours works like this. If you already own your domain it stays yours and always was. If we register a new one for you as part of the plan, we hold it while you are with us. Ask us on the phone and we will walk you through it before you sign anything.
- How long does it take to build a small business website?
- A straightforward five to eight page site takes most shops two to four weeks once they have your photos and your content. The delay is almost never the building. It is waiting on the business owner for photos, service descriptions and approval.