Ask five people what a website costs and you will get answers from $20 to $50,000, all of them technically true. That range is not because anyone is lying. It is because “a website” describes five completely different products.
Here is the whole landscape, what separates one tier from the next, and the part that gets left out of almost every quote.
First: a website has two prices, not one
This is the single most useful thing to understand before you talk to anybody.
The build is what you pay to have the site made. It is normally one payment.
The running costs are what you pay every year to keep it online: the domain name and the hosting. These are separate, they recur, and they are where surprises live.
When somebody quotes you “$1,200 for a website,” ask immediately what happens in month thirteen. Sometimes nothing. Sometimes there is a monthly fee attached that doubles the real cost over three years, and it was in the contract all along.
The five tiers, honestly
Do it yourself on a site builder. Roughly $16 to $49 a month, forever. Adds up to $200 to $600 a year, every year, and the site stops existing the day you stop paying. Fine for testing an idea. The templates are competent and the result looks like a template, which for some businesses is completely acceptable.
A freelancer. Anywhere from $500 to $5,000, depending on experience and scope. The quality range here is enormous. The risk is not price, it is availability: a freelancer who disappears in eighteen months leaves you with a site nobody can update.
A small studio. Roughly $800 to $6,000 for a small business site. You get a team rather than one person, and generally someone still answers the phone next year.
A full agency. $10,000 and up, often much more. This is genuinely worth it when the site is complex, when it connects to your inventory or booking systems, or when the brand work is a big part of what you are buying. It is money wasted on a four-page site for a local business.
Enterprise. $50,000 and up. If you are reading this article, this is not you.
What actually moves the number
In rough order of impact:
- How many pages, and how different they are. Ten pages that share one layout cost far less than four pages that are each designed separately.
- Whether you need to update it yourself. A menu or a price list you can edit costs more to build and saves you money forever. A site that requires a phone call for every change is cheaper up front and more expensive by year two.
- Two languages. Not double the price, but not free either. Every piece of text exists twice and both versions have to be maintained.
- Anything that takes money or bookings. Payments, reservations, ordering. This is the biggest single jump in complexity.
- Whether photography exists. If someone has to shoot your space or your products, that is a separate cost and it is often larger than people expect.
- How much writing you need done. Most quotes assume you provide the text. Most clients do not have it. This is the single most common reason projects stall for months.
The costs that show up later
The domain. Around $20 a year, renewed annually. Make sure it is registered in your name, not your developer’s. This is the most common way small businesses lose control of their own web address.
Hosting. Ours is $120 a year. It is what keeps the site online, and it is the cost that never goes away no matter who builds the site.
Maintenance, if the site is built on a CMS. This is the one people underestimate. A WordPress site with a dozen plugins needs those plugins updated regularly, and when one breaks, something on your site breaks with it. That is either your time or somebody’s invoice, and it is why “the website was cheap” and “the website costs me money every month” are both true so often.
Changes. Ask what a text edit costs after launch, before you sign. Some studios include small changes. Some charge an hour’s minimum to fix a typo.
When you should not pay for a custom site
We build websites, so read this with that in mind. But some businesses genuinely should not buy one yet:
- If you have not opened. Get the Google Business Profile and one page with your hours and phone number. Build the real site when you know what your business actually is.
- If nobody searches for what you do. Some businesses live entirely on referrals and foot traffic. A website still helps you look real, but a $450 page is the right size, not a $5,000 one.
- If you cannot commit to keeping it current. A site listing hours you no longer keep is worse than no site.
What we charge
Our prices are fixed for the two cases that cover most local businesses:
- $450 for a landing page: one page with everything your offer needs, built for the phone, with a contact form and tap-to-call.
- $800 for four pages: home, services, about and contact, or whatever four fit your business, in English and Spanish, with full SEO and connected to your Google listing.
- Quoted for anything larger: menus, catalogs, bookings, payments, integrations.
Those are one-time, for the build. After that, hosting is $120 a year and the domain $20, billed separately. That $140 a year is the entire recurring cost.
Worth putting next to the first tier above: a site builder subscription runs $200 to $600 a year, every year, and the site stops existing the day you stop paying. What we do not do is charge a monthly agency fee to keep a finished site alive.
We build without a CMS, which means there are no plugins to update and nothing on the site that can be hacked through an out-of-date extension. That removes the maintenance cost that surprises most small businesses in year two.
The comparison that actually matters
Not price against price. Price against what one new customer is worth to you.
If your average customer spends $200 and comes back twice a year, a site that brings you two extra customers a month has paid for itself several times over in its first quarter. If your average sale is $15 and people find you by walking past, the same site is a much harder argument, and you should spend that money on your Google listing and your reviews instead.
We will tell you which one you are. Tell us what you need and we will come back with a plan and a number before you decide anything.
You can also see seven sites we built and open them yourself, or read what a restaurant site specifically needs.