Pricing
How much does a website actually cost?
Quotes for the same brief routinely land between $500 and $50,000, which makes the number feel arbitrary. It is not. Here is what you are paying for at each level, and how to tell which one you need.
- 9 min read
- Updated 21 August 2026
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The short version
- A DIY builder runs roughly $150–$500 a year all-in, and costs you your own time instead.
- A professional small-business site typically lands between $2,500 and $12,000.
- Custom platforms with logins, payments or integrations start around $15,000 and climb with scope.
- Ongoing costs — hosting, domain, maintenance — are usually $200–$2,000 a year and are frequently left out of quotes.
Why the same brief gets wildly different quotes
A website is not one product. "Five pages about my business" and "five pages about my business, plus a booking system, plus a payment flow, plus a customer login" are separated by a single sentence in a brief and by a factor of ten in build cost.
Most of the spread in quotes comes down to four things: how much of the work is design versus assembly, whether anything needs building rather than configuring, how much content someone has to write, and how much of the aftercare is included. A quote that looks cheap has usually moved one of those four onto you.
The realistic price bands
DIY website builder — $150 to $500 a year
Squarespace, Wix, Shopify and similar. You get hosting, templates and a visual editor. The sticker price is genuinely low, and for a simple brochure site it is a defensible choice.
The real cost is your time. Most owners spend 20–60 hours getting something they are happy with. At any sensible valuation of your own hours — work it out with the hourly rate calculator — that is not a $200 project.
Freelancer — $800 to $5,000
One person doing design and build. Good freelancers deliver excellent work at this level. The risks are availability and continuity: holidays, illness and better-paying clients all compete with your project, and if they move on, the knowledge goes with them.
Small agency or studio — $2,500 to $12,000
Where most serious small-business websites land. You are paying for a designer, a developer and someone accountable for the schedule. Expect discovery, a real design phase, responsive build, basic SEO groundwork and a handover.
Custom build — $15,000 and up
Once you need user accounts, payments, a booking engine, an integration with your CRM or stock system, or anything genuinely bespoke, you are commissioning software rather than a website. Costs scale with the number of things that can go wrong, not the number of pages.
The costs that are usually missing from the quote
The build price is rarely the whole price. Budget for:
- Domain — $10–$40 a year, more for a premium name.
- Hosting — $60–$600 a year depending on traffic and whether it is managed.
- SSL certificate — usually free now via Let's Encrypt; be suspicious of anyone charging much for one.
- Content — copywriting and photography. Frequently the single largest hidden cost, and the one most likely to delay a launch by months.
- Maintenance — updates, backups, security patches. Either a retainer or your own time.
- Changes after launch — ask explicitly what is included and what is billed.
Ask any prospective supplier for the three-year total, not the build price. The ranking of quotes often changes when you do.
How to tell expensive from overpriced
Expensive is a high price with the work behind it. Overpriced is the same number without. Three questions separate them quickly:
- What am I getting that a template does not give me? If the answer is "a different colour scheme", the premium is not justified.
- Who owns it afterwards? You should own the domain, the hosting account, the content and the code. If leaving means starting over, the quote is a rental dressed as a purchase.
- What happens in month four? Anyone who cannot describe support, updates and change requests has priced a handover, not a relationship.
A good supplier will happily explain where the money goes. Vagueness about the breakdown is the reliable warning sign — far more so than the number itself.
What it should return
The only price question that really matters is whether the site pays for itself. A site that costs $6,000 and brings in two extra customers a month at $400 each has repaid itself before the end of the first quarter.
Work out your own version of that sum before committing: your average customer value, your close rate on enquiries, and how many additional enquiries the site plausibly produces. The break-even calculator turns those three figures into the number of extra customers the project needs to be worth doing.
If that number looks unreachable, the answer is not a cheaper website — it is a different project.
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