Cost
How much a small business website really costs.
The honest ranges — do it yourself, hire a freelancer, or hire an agency — and a straight answer on when you don’t need a full website yet.
Why it’s hard to pin down
The same website can cost $0 or $15,000.
Search for what a website costs and you get a shrug dressed up as an answer — “it depends.” It does depend, but not on anything mysterious. The price is set almost entirely by one choice: who builds and maintains it. That’s the whole spread, from nearly free to five figures.
Most pages that rank for this question are published by companies that sell websites, so the honest version — here’s the real range by route, and here’s when you shouldn’t spend at all yet — is one almost nobody in a position to take. We can, because a website isn’t what we sell. This is one branch of a bigger decision, laid out in full in build it yourself, hire it out, or hand it off.
The number on the invoice is the easy part. The number that matters is what it costs to keep alive.
By route
Three routes, three very different numbers.
Here are the real ranges a solo business runs into. Treat them as honest ballparks, not quotes — the point is the gap between them, and what each price does and doesn’t include.
i.
Do it yourself
Usually $200 to $800 a year. A website builder runs somewhere around $16 to $65 a month, plus roughly $15 a year for a domain. That’s the cheapest cash outlay by a wide margin — and we won’t pretend otherwise. What the price tag leaves out is your time: the building, and then the forever-after of updating it, keeping it working, and fixing what breaks. The subscription is small. The upkeep is yours.
ii.
Hire a freelancer
Commonly $1,000 to $5,000 up front. A good freelance designer gives you real craft — a site that’s genuinely yours, and the best-looking result of the three for the money. That’s the strength of the route. The quote rarely mentions what comes after: revisions are billed, and the day it’s delivered the upkeep lands back on you, so every later change is another email and another invoice.
iii.
Hire an agency
$5,000 to $15,000 and up. An agency brings a team — strategy, design, copy, the works — and for a business with real complexity, that can be worth every dollar. For most solo operations it’s more than the job needs, and it carries the longest timeline and the same catch as the freelance route: once it’s built, maintaining it is on you or on a retainer.
The hidden line
The cost every quote leaves off.
Whichever route you pick, the build price is a one-time number and the real cost is a recurring one. A website is a living thing: plugins need updating, a contact form quietly stops sending, a browser change breaks a layout, and the whole thing needs to stay secure against people testing the door. None of that shows up on the estimate, and all of it is yours the moment the site is live.
The honest math
Take any build price and add the part nobody quotes: a few hours of your month, every month, forever — or a maintenance retainer if you’d rather not. That’s the true price of a website, and it’s the line that turns a cheap build into an expensive year.
Some people try to dodge the build cost entirely by stitching together free tools instead — a free link page here, a free form there. That has its own hidden bill, and we added it up in one paid tool vs. five free ones.
Before you spend
The cheapest website is the one you don’t need yet.
Before you price any of this, it’s worth asking whether you need a full website at all right now. A lot of solo businesses build one because it’s what a real business is supposed to have — then use a single page of it while the rest sits empty.
Here’s an honest test. List the pages you’d build: Home, About, Services, Blog, Contact. Now cross off every one a prospect would never open before deciding to call you. For most solo businesses, what survives is a single clear page and a way to get in touch. And the big version has a cost the build price doesn’t cover: an “About” that’s a line of filler or a “Blog” whose last post is a year old doesn’t read as thorough — it reads as inactive. An empty room looks worse than no room.
If the answer is that you need less than a website, the next question is what to use instead — and that’s a real decision with a real winner depending on your work. We walked through it in link in bio, or a website?
One more route
One price that covers the build and the upkeep.
There’s a fourth option the first three don’t mention, because it isn’t a website at all. Instead of paying to build something and then paying — in time or money — to keep it alive, you hand the whole presence to a service that runs it for you, for one flat monthly price with no surprise line items. The build is done. The upkeep is ours. And it gets better on its own, without you lifting a finger.
That’s what You, Host’d is: your whole presence, handled, at one predictable price. If the true cost of a website is the part nobody quotes, this is the route that removes it. Here’s how it works — or see the whole thing for yourself, free for 14 days.