A small business website will cost you somewhere between $15 a month and $30,000 upfront. That's not a cop-out answer — those are the three real tiers, and which one applies to you depends on how important the site is to winning customers and what you need it to do.
The short version: if your website is mainly a credibility check and you need it fast, a builder like Squarespace or Wix costs $15–50/month and can be live this week. If customers actively search for what you do and the site needs to convert them, expect to pay a freelancer $1,000–$5,000 or an agency $5,000–$30,000+. Everything below is just detail on what you actually get for those numbers.
The Three Ways to Get a Website
DIY Website Builder
Builders — Squarespace, Wix, WordPress.com, Shopify for e-commerce — give you a hosted platform with templates, a drag-and-drop editor, and everything included in one monthly fee. Typical cost: $15–50/month.
What you get: a functional, reasonably good-looking site without needing to know anything technical. Templates are designed by professionals. Hosting, security certificates, and software updates are handled for you.
Hidden costs: your time. A week of evenings writing copy, fiddling with layouts, and uploading photos is real labour. You also inherit the template's limitations — most builders make it difficult to do anything the template doesn't already support. And you don't own the site: if the platform raises prices or you want to move, you're rebuilding from scratch.
Freelance Developer
A freelancer builds a site to your specification, hands it over, and you run it yourself. Typical cost for a small business site: $1,000–$5,000. Typical timeline: 1–3 weeks.
What you get: something that looks like your brand rather than a template, usually faster on mobile, and with the features you specifically asked for. You own the code. You can move hosts. A good freelancer will also care about whether the site actually brings in customers, not just whether it launches.
Hidden costs: managing the project. You'll need to provide copy, images, and feedback. If the brief is vague, the final site will be too. Scope creep is the most common reason freelance projects go over budget — what starts as a five-page site grows into twelve pages, three integrations, and a booking system.
Agency
An agency brings a full team: designers, developers, copywriters, project managers, sometimes strategists. Typical cost: $5,000–$30,000+. Typical timeline: 1–3 months.
What you get: a professionally managed process, custom design from scratch, usually a higher standard of copywriting, and ongoing support. For businesses where the website is a primary revenue channel, the investment is often justified.
Hidden costs: the process itself. Agencies have a lot of meetings. You'll fill in discovery questionnaires, approve design concepts, do multiple review rounds. It takes more of your time than you'd expect, even though you're paying a team to do the work.
What Drives the Price Up
Custom design. A template site costs less because the design work is already done. Custom design — where a designer starts from your brand and creates original layouts — adds meaningful cost to both freelancer and agency quotes.
Content writing. Most quotes don't include copy. Writing the actual words for your site — five to ten pages of clear, persuasive, SEO-conscious text — is a specialist skill, and most businesses underestimate how much time it takes. If you want a copywriter included, ask for it explicitly and expect it to add $500–$3,000 depending on scope.
Integrations. A simple brochure site is cheap. A site that connects to your booking system, takes payments, syncs with your CRM, and sends automated emails is more complex and therefore more expensive. Every integration is a dependency that needs configuring and testing.
E-commerce. Adding a shop changes the scope significantly — product pages, cart, checkout, payment processing, order management. This is worth doing properly; a broken checkout loses money immediately. For straightforward e-commerce, Shopify is usually the right tool (and a freelancer can set it up for you); for complex requirements, budget agency rates.
Ongoing Costs Nobody Mentions
One-time build cost is only part of what you'll spend. Here's what adds up:
Domain: $10–20/year. Non-negotiable. Use a reputable registrar (Cloudflare, Namecheap) and keep auto-renewal on — losing your domain is an avoidable disaster.
Hosting: $10–30/month for a typical small business site if a developer built it. If you're on a builder, it's included in your subscription.
Builder subscription maths over three years: A Squarespace Business plan at around $30/month is $1,080 over three years. Add a premium template ($100–300), any paid plugins, and a domain, and you're comfortably past $1,500. That's not far from the lower end of freelance rates — and with a freelancer, you'd own the site at the end of it rather than paying rent in perpetuity.
Maintenance: Software updates, content changes, the occasional broken thing that needs fixing. If you have a developer, this is billed hourly or via a retainer — typical small business maintenance work is a few hours per quarter, so budget for it rather than letting it become a surprise. If you're on a builder, the platform handles software updates, but you're still spending your own time on content: writing new pages, updating your services, keeping offers current. That time isn't free even if the platform doesn't charge extra for it.
When DIY Is Genuinely the Right Call
I build websites for a living, so saying this costs me potential work — but here it is: if you're at the idea stage and haven't yet confirmed that customers will pay for what you do, a builder is the right choice.
Don't spend $3,000 on a website for a business that isn't sure it has a market yet. Spend a weekend on Squarespace, put up the basics, and test whether people actually contact you. If they do, you'll have much clearer requirements for a proper site — and a clear business case for the investment.
DIY also makes sense if: your website is genuinely just a credibility check and customers find you through referrals; you enjoy the technical side and don't mind spending time on it; or your budget is firmly under $500.
For anything else — especially if people search for what you do, if you're selling online, or if you need something that performs better than a standard template — a developer will give you a better return on the money.
How I Quote Websites
I do a free 30-minute call to understand what you actually need, then write a fixed scope document before quoting anything. Fixed scope means you know exactly what's in the price and there are no surprises. No open-ended hourly billing that runs over budget while you're not watching.
The scope document covers: which pages you need, what each page does, which integrations are required, what content you're providing versus what I'm writing, and what "done" looks like. Once we agree on that document, the price is fixed — scope changes are quoted separately before any work starts.
If you're looking for a developer who treats the website as a business tool rather than a creative project, you can see what I offer. I work with small businesses directly, typically at the freelance end of the market.
For a practical comparison of builders versus developers, read Wix or Squarespace vs Hiring a Developer. If you're further along and ready to brief a developer, Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Web Developer will help you get useful answers rather than vague quotes.
