Ask five agencies what a website costs and you'll get five answers spanning two orders of magnitude. Here's the honest breakdown — including our own number, because pricing you have to “book a call” to learn isn't pricing.
The market, roughly
- DIY template builders: $200–$500/year forever, plus your evenings, plus the hidden costs — speed, rankings, sameness.
- Freelancer template setups: $500–$2,000. Often a template with your logo swapped in. You inherit the platform's problems with an invoice attached.
- Traditional agencies: $5,000–$50,000, in weeks-to-months, because you're paying for project managers, account reps, and revision meetings — not more website.
- AI-first, hand-coded (us): the build is included in every monthly plan (from $175/month, no upfront fee), live in about two weeks. AI handles the volume work; a human operator handles judgment. That's the entire trick — the savings are structural, not a discount.
What you should actually pay for
Not pages. Outcomes. A small business site earns its cost when it loads instantly, says clearly what you do and where, ranks for your service in your area, gets you cited by AI assistants, and turns visitors into calls. Those come from engineering and structure — schema, speed, answer-shaped content — not from a fourth round of homepage animations.
The recurring-cost trap
The quote is only half the question. Ask what it costs to keep: platform fees, plugin renewals, “maintenance” retainers with no defined output. Our pricing is published: a professional site with hosting and care at $175 a month, and growth plans at $750–$1,500 for businesses that want the rankings actively pushed. If a vendor can't tell you exactly what you get each month, ask why.
One honest rule of thumb
If a website quote can't be explained in terms of what it will earn you — calls, bookings, customers — it's a decoration quote. Decoration is fine. It's just not what a small business needs from the internet.