What Should a Website Actually Cost? A Straight Answer

Ask three agencies what a website costs and you'll get three answers: "it depends," "let's schedule a call," and a number with no explanation attached. That's frustrating when you're just trying to figure out whether this is a $3,000 decision or a $30,000 one.

So here's a straight answer, with the reasoning behind it.

The Short Version

Most business websites fall into six brackets. These are full project costs — design, build, content setup, launch.

$249 — Get Found

The smallest thing that still works: a single landing page with your services, hours, and a contact form, plus your Google Business profile set up properly so you show up in local searches and on Maps. Live in a few days.

This exists for the business that has no web presence at all and is choosing between something and nothing. It is not a full website and I won't pretend otherwise — it's the page that makes you findable, professional, and reachable, which for a lot of new businesses is 90% of what a website was ever doing for them.

$499 — The Starter Site

One page, up to five sections, live in about a week. Everything in Get Found, plus a real structure: your story, your services broken out, photos, testimonials, and a design built around your brand rather than a stock layout.

I built both of these tiers on purpose. A business in its first year shouldn't have to choose between a real web presence and a month of inventory, and the alternative most people land on — a free page builder with someone else's branding on it — quietly costs them customers. This is the honest floor: small, fixed, and finished.

What keeps these prices fixed is that the scope doesn't move. One page, one round of revisions, your content provided and ready. Not included: multi-page structures, e-commerce, booking systems, logins, content writing, or photography. Those aren't upsells I'm dangling — they're genuinely different projects, and I'll tell you plainly which bracket they land in.

$500 - $2,500 — Template Sites

A polished template, your branding, your content, a handful of pages. Fast to launch, usually 2-3 weeks.

This is the right choice if you need a professional presence and nothing more: hours, location, services, a contact form. It's the wrong choice if the site needs to do anything — take bookings, sync with your inventory, handle logins.

$2,500 - $7,500 — Custom Small Business Sites

A design built for your business rather than adapted to it, 5-15 pages, a content management system so you can make your own updates, SEO foundation, analytics. Typically 4-6 weeks.

This is where most small businesses land, and it's where the money starts doing real work: a site built around how customers actually find and evaluate you, instead of a template you're squeezing yourself into.

$7,500 - $20,000 — Sites That Do Something

Custom functionality: booking systems, customer portals, payment processing, integrations with software you already use, multilingual content. Usually 6-12 weeks.

The price jump isn't design — it's that every feature has to be built, tested, and secured. A booking system that takes payments has to handle failures, refunds, double-bookings, and time zones. That's engineering, not decoration.

$20,000+ — Web Applications

At this point you're not buying a website, you're buying software with a web address. Custom workflows, user roles and permissions, real-time data, third-party APIs, ongoing feature development.

If you're here, the site is the product, or close to it.

What Actually Moves the Number

Two projects with the same page count can differ by a factor of five. Here's what drives that:

• Content readiness. If your copy, photos, and product data are written and organized, the build moves fast. If they aren't, someone has to create them — and that's often 20-30% of a project's cost hiding in plain sight.
• Integrations. Every system the site has to talk to — your CRM, accounting software, inventory, email platform — adds work. Two integrations is a feature. Six is a project.
• Number of decision-makers. This one surprises people. A project with one decision-maker moves twice as fast as one with a committee, and time is the thing you're paying for.
• Custom vs. configured. "Can we make the booking flow work like X?" is a very different question from "can we turn on booking?"
• Compliance requirements. Handling health data, payment data, or operating under accessibility requirements adds real scope. Necessary, but it isn't free.

The Cost Nobody Quotes You

The build is a one-time number. Running the site isn't. Budget for:

• Hosting: $10-100/month for most business sites
• Domain: $15-40/year
• SSL certificate: usually free now, and should be
• Maintenance: updates, security patches, backups, and someone to call when something breaks

That last one is where businesses get caught. A site that hasn't been updated in three years isn't saving you money — it's accumulating security debt that costs far more to fix than to prevent. I wrote about that math in The Real Cost of Downtime.

If you'd rather not think about any of it, a care plan starting around $49/month covers hosting, updates, backups, monitoring, and small content changes — with a person to call rather than a support ticket queue.

Small Is Fine. Cheap and Vague Is Not.

There's a difference between a small project and a bad deal, and it isn't the price.

A small project has a defined edge. You know what you're getting, what you're not, and when it's done. The $249 and $499 tiers are small on purpose — and because the scope is written down, they finish.

A bad deal is the $800 site with no edges. It gets built on a page builder that loads slowly, which quietly costs you search rankings and mobile visitors. You can't edit it yourself. Nobody wrote down what was included, so the work drags. And when you outgrow it in eighteen months there's nothing underneath to build on, so you start over. The $800 site plus the $5,000 rebuild is a $5,800 site that also cost you a year and a half of underperformance.

The trap runs the other way too. Spending more up front isn't automatically better — spending on the wrong thing is how projects go over budget, whether that's a beautiful site nobody can find or a complex system nobody on your team can operate.

Ask for the edges. Any price is reasonable when you can see exactly what sits inside it.

How to Budget When You Don't Know What You Need

You don't have to arrive with a spec. Do this instead:

1. Write down what you want to be different. Not features — outcomes. "I want to stop taking appointments over the phone." "I want customers to stop calling to ask our hours."
2. Separate must-have from nice-to-have. Almost every project has one or two features that account for a third of the cost. Knowing which ones they are lets you decide if they're worth it.
3. Ask for the number in phases. A good proposal shows you what launching with the essentials costs versus everything at once. You can always add in phase two, with real usage data telling you what to add.
4. Ask what happens after launch. If the answer is vague, that's your answer.

The Honest Part

Any number given before understanding your business is a guess dressed up as a quote. What you should expect is a clear breakdown of what you're paying for, what it will do, and what it costs to keep running — before you sign anything.

If someone won't give you that, the price isn't the problem.

Trying to figure out what your project would actually cost? Tell me what you're trying to fix — no technical vocabulary required — and I'll give you a real range and the reasoning behind it, free. If the honest answer is the $249 page, that's what I'll tell you.