How much should a small business website cost?

The four ranges

Almost every quote falls into one of four buckets.

• DIY builder: $16 to $50 a month, plus however many evenings you spend on it. Real cost is your time.
• Freelancer, one-time build: $500 to $3,000. You own it. Hosting, updates and edits are yours to sort out afterwards.
• Agency, one-time build: $3,000 to $15,000 and up. More process, more people, usually a longer timeline.
• Build and maintain, monthly: $100 to $600 a month. The build is included and so is the upkeep. No large payment up front.

What actually moves the price

Design is rarely the expensive part. What moves a quote is how much has to be written, and how much keeps happening after launch.

A five-page brochure site with your logo and hours is a few days of work. A site with a real page for each service you offer, structured data so Google and AI assistants know what you do, and something answering enquiries when you cannot, is a different job entirely.

The second one is also the one that gets found. Which brings up the part most quotes leave out.

The cheap build that costs the most

The most expensive website a small business can buy is a $900 one that nobody ever finds.

It is not a bad deal because the work was bad. It is a bad deal because a site with almost nothing on its pages cannot rank, and a site that cannot rank produces no customers. You paid once and got a business card that lives on the internet.

When we crawl a local site and strip out the navigation and footer that repeat on every page, most come back under 4,000 words across the entire domain. The last one measured had 52 pages and two with enough on them to compete. That site looked finished.

Questions worth asking before you pay anyone

Whoever you hire, these four separate a real quote from a number someone made up.

• Who owns the domain, and is it registered in my name? The answer should be yes, on day one.
• What happens when I need a change in six months, and what does it cost?
• Is anyone writing content after launch, or is this a one-time build?
• Can I see a site you built that ranks for something competitive?

What I charge, since the page should say

Between $149 and $599 a month depending on how much is handled, or $2,500 and up for a one-time build you own outright with no monthly.

The monthly includes hosting, the build, and the upkeep. What changes between tiers is how much writing and automation happens every month, not whether you get a website.