What A Small Business Website Actually Costs

Ask three people what a website costs and you'll get four hundred dollars, four thousand dollars, and a request for a discovery call. All three are describing real things. None of them are describing the same thing. That's why the question feels impossible to answer, and it's why most people end up buying on price alone, which is the one basis on which this decision goes wrong most reliably.

So here is the honest version, including my own numbers, because I think a page that quotes prices is worth more than a page that promises a conversation.

What I charge, and why it's on the website

My packages are one thousand five hundred, three thousand, and six thousand and up. Those are on the services page with the exact figures, they're the same for everyone, and they don't move depending on how your business looks on a call.

I publish them for a selfish reason as much as an honest one. If your budget is four hundred dollars, you find that out in ten seconds instead of after a scheduling link, a thirty-minute call and a proposal. That's ten seconds of your time and an hour of mine, and neither of us spent it finding out something a number on a page could have told us.

The cheapest one is a single page, written and built, with the domain, a business email address on it, a Google listing set up properly and a contact form that reaches you. What that page should actually say depends a lot on what kind of business you run. The middle one adds pages, booking, a proper pass over the words, and the local search work. Above that you're not buying a website anymore, you're buying software — accounts, payments, a database — and that gets quoted after a conversation because the range is genuinely wide.

Why the same project gets quoted so differently

Four things move the number, and almost nothing else does.

How many pages have to be written. Not built — written. Building a page is fast. Deciding what it should say, in a voice that sounds like you, is the slow part, and it's the part that decides whether the site works. A five-page site isn't five times a one-page site in build time. It's close to five times in writing time.

Whether money moves. A site that shows information and a site that takes a booking and a card are different categories of work. The moment payments are involved, so are refunds, failed charges, receipts, disputes, and what the site does when the payment processor is having a bad morning. That's not a feature, it's a whole surface area.

Whether anyone has to log in. Accounts mean passwords, resets, permissions, and someone's personal information sitting in a database you're now responsible for. It's the single biggest jump in price in this whole list, and it's the one people most often don't realise they're asking for.

Who's doing it. An agency has account managers, project managers, designers and developers, and all of them are on your invoice. That's not a scam — for a large project that structure is worth paying for. For a plumber who needs five pages and a booking form, you're funding a layer of coordination that exists to manage people you'll never meet.

The costs that don't stop

The build is the number everyone asks about. The ongoing costs are the ones that surprise people, so here they are plainly.

A .com domain is a small annual charge — in the region of fifteen dollars a year, and it goes up a little over time. It has to be renewed. If it lapses, your site goes dark and someone else can buy your address, which is a bad afternoon.

Business email on your own domain is a few dollars a month per person. Worth every cent. An email from yourname@yourbusiness.com and an email from yourbusiness2019@gmail.com are read differently, by everyone, whether or not they'd admit it.

Hosting for a normal small business site is either free or close to it in the year 2026. If someone is charging you a meaningful monthly amount purely to keep a five-page site online, ask what it's for.

Someone to change things. This is the real one. Websites aren't finished, they're abandoned. Your hours change, you hire someone, a price goes up, you stop offering a service. If there's nobody whose job it is to make those edits, they don't get made, and in two years the site is actively wrong. My care plans start at under a hundred a month and that's mostly what they are: a person who makes the change when you ask.

The cheap options, honestly

Building it yourself on a website builder. This is a legitimate choice and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. If you have a weekend, some patience and a clear idea of what you want to say, you can put up something decent. What you're actually paying is your own time, twice — once to build it and again every time you go back in and remember how it works. The monthly fee is also not the advertised one, because the plan with the features you want is never the cheapest tier.

Someone very cheap, overseas or local. Also sometimes fine. The risk isn't the build quality, which can be good. The risk is what the site is like a year later, when you need one thing changed and the person who built it has moved on to other work. See below.

A free website from another service. Your listing provider, your booking platform, your point-of-sale company — several of them will give you a website. It works, and it's free, and it lives on their domain under their control, built out of your customer data. It's fine until the day you want to leave.

What I'd actually ask before hiring anyone

Four questions, and the answers tell you more than a portfolio does.

Whose name is the domain registered in? If the answer isn't yours, that's the whole interview.
What does it cost to change something after launch? An unanswerable question here is a red flag. So is "just email me" with no number attached.
What happens if you're unavailable? Everybody gets busy. The question is whether the site is stuck when that happens.
Can I see something you built two years ago that's still running? Anyone can show you a launch. Fewer can show you something that's still being maintained.

The part I can't tell you

I can't tell you what a website is worth to your business, because I don't know what a customer is worth to you. If one new client a year covers the whole thing, the maths is easy. If your margin is thin and your customers come entirely from a contractor who subcontracts to you, a website might genuinely not be the best place for this money, and I'd rather say that than sell you one.

What I can tell you is the price before you spend an hour finding it out. It's on the services page, it's the same for everyone, and it doesn't change based on how the call goes. If you already know roughly what you want, tell me about it and you'll have a written scope before you pay anything.