How much does a website cost?

What you actually pay comes down to one question the guides tend to bury: who builds it, and how much of it belongs to you when they are done. Build it yourself on a template and you are paying little more than a monthly subscription. Hire someone to design and code a site you actually own and you are into the thousands, sometimes the tens of thousands once an agency with a sales team and an office adds its overhead on top. The common routes, and what each really runs, are broken out just below.

So here is a real floor to stand on, not an average. These are my own published numbers, computed by the same model behind my calculator. A focused three page site is $3,250. A five page small business site with a logo already in hand is $6,250. A real store carrying a catalog and a payment path lands near $12,100. Those are prices at one working studio, and the rest of this page is what they are made of.

The same five page site can cost $200 a year or $20,000, and the thing that moves it that far is not the pages. It is who you hire. Read the ranges as four different answers to four different questions, not four prices for one thing.

I am one person who does the whole build, so I sit where a good freelancer sits on price and where an agency sits on capability. My baseline is $3,250 and a finished small business site is $6,250, under most agency starting points for the same work. The reason that is possible, and the honest downside that comes with it, is laid out just below.

A website is not one purchase. It is a few, and the pages quoting you one big number rarely separate them. Some of these are paid once, some come back every year, and one of them is the whole reason the total swings so wide.

The domain and the hosting are the small, predictable costs, the ones that fit on a single line and stay roughly the same whether your site is plain or elaborate. The build is the one that moves. That is why a cost calculator exists at all: to price the one piece that a fixed range cannot. Everything else is close to a rounding error next to it.

The build price answers what a site costs to make. It says nothing about what it costs to keep, and that second number is the one people get surprised by. On a builder, the monthly fee never stops: $16 to $99 a month, every month, for as long as the site is up. On a custom site the ongoing cost can be almost nothing, because a domain runs about $12 to $20 a year and a static site hosts for little or free.

The variable is maintenance. A plain static site can sit untouched and stay fine. A site on WordPress or a similar system needs regular care or it drifts toward getting hacked, which most people budget for at $50 to $200 a month with an agency. My version of that is a WordPress care plan at $550 every six months, and for anything else I bill the minutes the work takes at $5 a minute, listed in full on the rates page. There is no retainer humming in the background that you did not ask for.

In practice, once a site of mine is live, the ordinary things you will need cost about this much, every figure the same $5.25 a minute applied to the time the job takes.

Anywhere from a free weekend on a builder to six figures, and the spread usually has more to do with who you called than with what you asked for. A Manhattan or San Francisco shop will price a five page site at a number that would cover a small company's whole year. An overseas shop will quote you $500 for something you will quietly pay somebody else to rebuild in eighteen months. Both of those are the American website market, and neither is telling you what the work costs.

I build remotely for clients across the country, and the number does not move with your zip code. The small business site above is $6,250 whether you are in Ohio or Oregon, because it is the same work either way and I am not pricing your area code. The only thing your location changes is what the shops down the street from you have quoted, which is most of the reason this page publishes real figures instead of a range.