Nobody wants to ask this question out loud, because the honest answer is always "it depends" — and that sounds like a dodge. It isn't. A website is closer to a renovation than a product: the same square footage can cost wildly different amounts depending on what goes inside it.
So instead of a single number, here are the real bands, what moves you between them, and the costs most quotes quietly leave out.
The four price bands
Under $500 — templates and DIY
Wix, Squarespace, or a purchased WordPress theme you set up yourself. You get a functioning website. You do not get strategy, custom design, or anyone thinking about whether the page persuades anybody.
This is genuinely the right answer if you need a placeholder while you validate the business. It is the wrong answer if the website is your main sales channel.
$500–$2,500 — a competent small business site
Five to eight pages, a customised theme, your own copy and images, mobile-responsive, contact form, basic on-page SEO. Usually a freelancer or small studio.
This is where most small businesses should land. The gap between a $400 site and a $2,000 site is much larger than the price difference suggests, because the second one has someone thinking about structure and conversion.
$2,500–$10,000 — custom design and build
Original design rather than a customised template. Ten to thirty pages, a real content strategy, custom functionality, proper technical SEO, performance work, sometimes a booking system or basic e-commerce.
At this level you should expect a discovery phase before anyone writes code.
$10,000+ — complex builds
Large e-commerce catalogues, multi-language sites, custom web applications, CRM and ERP integrations, or anything with unusual functionality. Also where you land if you need a full brand identity built alongside the site.
A useful sanity check: if your website is expected to generate leads worth $50,000 a year, spending $800 on it is not thrift. It is underinvestment.
What actually drives the price up
Six things move a quote more than anything else.
- Page count — but less than people think. Ten similar service pages cost far less than three genuinely different page types.
- Custom design vs template — this is usually the single biggest line item. Original design is design time, and design time is expensive.
- Content — if you supply finished copy and images, you save real money. If the developer has to write your copy, expect to add 30–50%.
- Functionality — booking, payments, memberships, calculators, multi-step forms, third-party integrations. Each one is a project inside the project.
- E-commerce — product count matters, but so does variant complexity, tax handling, shipping rules, and how your inventory system works.
- Revision rounds — open-ended revisions are how projects go over budget. A good quote caps them.
The costs quotes usually leave out
This is where people get surprised.
- Domain — $10–$20 per year.
- Hosting — $5–$30 per month for a small business site. Cheap shared hosting is a false economy; it is the most common cause of a slow site.
- SSL certificate — usually free now via Let's Encrypt. If someone charges you for a basic one, ask why.
- Premium plugins or licences — $50–$400 per year for things like form builders, booking systems, or page builders.
- Stock photography — $10–$50 per image, or a subscription.
- Maintenance — updates, backups, security monitoring. $50–$200 per month, or you do it yourself and accept the risk.
- Copywriting — $100–$500 per page if you hire it out.
- SEO — a separate ongoing service, not a one-time build task. See our SEO services for what that involves.
Budget roughly 15–25% of the build cost per year for running it. A $3,000 site realistically costs $450–$750 a year to keep healthy.
Fixed price or hourly?
Fixed price is better for you when the scope is genuinely clear. You know the number, and overruns are the studio's problem. The catch: anything outside the written scope becomes a change request, so read the scope carefully.
Hourly is better for open-ended or exploratory work. The catch is obvious.
Most good small studios quote fixed price for the build and hourly for changes afterwards. That is a reasonable structure.
How to compare quotes without getting fooled
Three quotes for "a website" are not comparable unless you force them into the same shape. Ask every one of them:
- How many pages, and which ones specifically?
- Custom design, or a customised template? Which theme?
- Who writes the copy?
- How many revision rounds are included?
- What happens to the price if I ask for something not in scope?
- Is technical SEO included, or is that separate?
- Do I own the site and the files at the end?
- What does month 13 cost me?
That last question separates the studios who plan to be around from the ones who do not.
What we charge and why
We publish our ranges on the pricing page rather than making you ask. Broadly: most small business builds land between $1,500 and $6,000, depending on page count, whether the design is custom, and who writes the content. Anything with e-commerce or unusual functionality gets quoted individually after a scoping call.
We also do not separate "the website" from "will it rank", because that separation is how sites end up needing an SEO rescue six months after launch.