You already know you need a website. The question keeping you up is what it should cost, because you’ve heard $500 from your cousin’s friend and $6,000 from an agency, and nobody will explain the difference. Most pricing pages won’t even give you a number until you book a call.
Here’s the whole answer, with numbers.
The short answer
There are four realistic routes for a small business in 2026:
- Do it yourself with a site builder: roughly $200–$600 a year, plus your evenings.
- Hire a freelancer: usually $300–$1,500 one-time, and quality varies wildly.
- A flat-fee shop like ours: $400, one time. The price is on the page.
- A custom agency build: $2,000–$10,000 or more, and sometimes worth it.
None of these is wrong. They’re right for different businesses, and the rest of this article is about figuring out which one you are.
Do it yourself: cheap on paper, expensive on weekends
Wix, Squarespace, and their cousins run somewhere around $16–$50 a month depending on the plan.
Honestly? If you have the time and you enjoy this kind of thing, DIY is a legitimate choice. Plenty of businesses start there and do fine.
The cost that doesn’t show up on the invoice is your time. A DIY website builder gives you hundreds of templates and no opinion about which fits your business. You’ll spend a Saturday picking one, another making the fonts behave, and a third figuring out why it looks broken on your phone. If your hourly rate matters to you, do that math before calling DIY the cheap option.
The other catch: when something breaks or needs changing, you’re the web person now 🎉.
A freelancer: $300–$1,500, and it depends who you get
The freelancer market is wide open, which cuts both ways. There are excellent people charging modest rates, and there are people reselling a template with your logo dropped in.
Before you pay anyone, ask three questions:
- Can I see three sites you built that are live right now?
- Who owns the domain and the site when we’re done?
- What happens when I need a change in eight months?
Clear answers to all three usually mean you’ve found one of the good ones. Vague answers mean you’re about to pay $800 to learn a lesson.
A flat-fee shop like ours: $400, and here’s why that’s possible
We build static websites for $400, flat. That covers a custom design and build for your business, working on every device, search-engine ready, a contact form wired to your inbox, and setup on your own domain. Revisions until it looks right.
The reason that price works isn’t because of cut corners. It’s that simple sites are quick to build when you’ve built dozens of them, and a static site skips most of the moving parts that make web projects expensive.
Just as important is what $400 doesn’t include: online stores, booking systems, customer logins, custom applications. If someone quotes you $400 for an e-commerce site, be suspicious. When our clients need those things, we quote them separately and plainly.
An agency: $2,000–$10,000+, sometimes worth every dollar
Agencies aren’t villains. If you need an online store with inventory, a customer portal, complex integrations with the systems you already run, or a full brand identity along with the site, a real team is the right call, and real teams cost real money.
The problem is when a five-page site for a landscaping company gets quoted like it’s an app. If nobody can explain what the extra thousands of dollars buy you, they’re pricing the industry average instead of your project.
The ongoing costs nobody itemizes
Whatever route you pick, these keep coming after launch:
- Domain name: $10–$20 a year.
- Hosting: this is where site type matters. A static site can host on modern platforms for free or nearly free. Managed WordPress hosting typically runs $20–$60 a month, and those plugins will need updates forever.
- Email at your domain: around $6–$8 per user per month with Google Workspace or Microsoft 365.
- Maintenance: near zero for a static site. Budget real money, or real time, for anything with a database and plugins.
Over five years, a “cheap” $16-a-month builder plan costs about $960 before your time. It’s worth comparing that number against a one-time build.
When paying more actually pays off
A website’s job is to bring in work. Upgrades earn their place when they remove a bottleneck you can measure.
Say you run a two-chair barbershop and no-shows cost you a few hundred dollars a month. A booking system with automatic reminders doesn’t need to be cheap to pay for itself; it needs to beat that number. Same logic for automated follow-ups when you’re slow to answer quote requests, or a landing page when you’re spending on ads that currently point at your homepage.
Start with the math, not the feature list. If the math doesn’t clear, don’t buy it yet. That’s the advice we give paying clients, and it’s the same advice in this blog post.
Red flags, whoever you hire
- You don’t own your own domain. Non-negotiable. If the relationship ends and they keep the keys, that’s hostage-taking, not hosting.
- A monthly “SEO package” with no listed deliverables. Ask what specifically they’ll do each month. Watch what happens.
- Nobody will show you live sites they built. Screenshots and mockups don’t count.
So what should yours cost?
If you mostly need customers to find you, see what you do, and get in touch: a few hundred dollars, whichever route you take. If your website has to run part of the business — bookings, sales, logins — expect four figures and make sure the math above clears.
And whoever builds it: get the price in writing before the work starts.
Want the number for your business?
Tell us what you need and you’ll have a plain quote within 24 hours. For most businesses it’s $400, and if you need less than you think, we’ll say that.