· By Justin Hearn
What a small-business website actually costs
Real numbers, the costs nobody quotes, and how to tell a fair price from a trap.
A small-business website costs somewhere between $0 and $50,000. Which is a useless answer, so let me give you the real one.
Most small businesses I talk to should plan on $2,500 to $15,000 for a site that's built well and that they actually own. Where you land comes down to one question: do you need a website that looks good, or a website that does work?
That's the whole thing in two sentences. The rest is why the number jumps around so much, and where your money actually goes.
Why the range is so wide
Four very different things all go by the name “a website.” No wonder the quotes feel random.
You can build one yourself on Wix or Squarespace for about $20 a month. You do the work, you rent it forever, and it looks like the template it came from. That's a real option. For some businesses it's the right one, at least to start.
You can pay a template shop around $997 and have something live in a week. Those exist and I won't pretend they don't. The catch is what “from $997” turns into the moment you want anything specific, and what you're left holding the day you want to leave.
Then there's hand-built, which is what I do. Every page designed and coded for your business, no page-builder, no template underneath. That starts at $2,500 and climbs with how much the site has to do.
And there's custom software, where the website is the front door to something bigger. Booking, intake, quoting, a tool that runs part of how you work. That starts around $15,000, because you're paying for software that actually runs something.
Same word, four price tags that aren't close.
| What “a website” means | Starts around | You own it? |
|---|---|---|
| Build it yourself (Wix, Squarespace) | $20/mo | No — you rent it |
| Template shop | $997 | Usually not — and leaving means starting over |
| Hand-built (what I do) | $2,500 | Yes — all of it |
| Custom software | $15,000 | Yes — all of it |
The costs nobody puts in the quote
Here's where most pricing conversations go sideways. They quote you the build and stop.
The build is the cheap part. What costs you is everything around it.
Do you own it? If your site lives on a platform you rent, you can't take it with you. Wix sites don't export to anything you can actually use somewhere else. Plenty of agencies quietly keep the domain or the hosting in their own name, so “your” website is theirs with your logo on it. The day you want out, you start over. I've rebuilt enough of those to know the price: usually the whole site, paid for twice.
Who's holding the keys? Your domain, your hosting login, your analytics, the actual code. If you can't say where those live and whose name they're in, that's a bill waiting to happen.
What does it cost to keep running? Every site needs hosting, updates, and the occasional fix. Some shops fold that into a monthly fee you can't cancel without losing the site. I charge $100 a month for it on a standard site, it's optional, and if you stop, you keep everything.
A $997 site you have to rebuild in two years cost you more than the $6,000 one you never had to touch.
What you're actually paying for
Real numbers. These are mine, and they sit on my pricing page, because a shop that hides its prices is usually telling you something about the prices.
- A hand-built marketing site: from $2,500. A handful of pages, designed and coded for you, fast and mobile-friendly, with the SEO basics done right. You own all of it.
- A site that does something: from $6,000. Everything above, plus the working parts. Online booking. New-customer forms people fill out from home. Payments. Whatever takes real work off your desk.
- Custom software: from $15,000, scoped. For when the website has to run a real process. Booking, intake, a tool your staff works in all day.
- Upkeep: from $100 a month, optional. Hosting, monitoring, backups, small updates. Cancel anytime, keep everything.
Here's an honest one. Last year I rebuilt a local dental office's website. A simple site, built by hand, the kind of thing that sits in that first $2,500 tier. I billed them $1,000.
That was me underpricing my own work, and I'm telling you because it's the true story of how this pricing landed where it did. They got a $2,500 site for $1,000. A good deal for them. But the number on the page now is what that work is worth, and the $1,000 was me figuring that out.
Why I quote one fixed price
Most of the stress about what a website costs comes from not knowing whether the quote is real.
So here's how I run it. You tell me what you need. You get a fixed price in writing before I start anything. It doesn't move unless you change what you asked for, and if that happens, I tell you before I do the work, not after, on an invoice.
No hourly meter. No “final pricing may vary based on scope.” The number you agree to is the number you pay.
So what should you actually spend?
If you're a local business that needs to look as good as you are and show up when someone searches for you, you're in the $2,500 to $6,000 range, and you should own every piece of what you get.
If your website needs to do a job, take bookings, handle intake, replace a spreadsheet you hate, you're past $6,000 and into something custom. That's usually money that pays itself back in the hours you stop losing.
And if someone quotes you $500, ask what happens the day you want to leave. If someone won't give you a number until you're on a sales call, ask why the price is a secret.
That's what I'd want to know if it were my money going out the door.
Thinking about a site for your business? Tell me what you need and I'll send back a fixed quote. No pressure, no sales call you have to sit through to hear a number.