A small business website usually costs somewhere between $2,000 and $10,000 to build, and roughly $15 to $50 a month to keep online. If someone quotes you $500, they're selling a template with your name dropped into it. If someone quotes you $40,000, you're paying for a marketing agency's office space. Most owner-operated businesses land in the middle, and where you land inside that range depends on one thing: whether you need the site to look current, work correctly, or say something different about your business than it says today.
That's the honest answer. Here's how to figure out which number is yours.
Why the range is so wide
A website isn't one thing you buy. It's three, and they're priced differently.
The first is the template. You can get a decent-looking site from a DIY builder for the cost of the subscription, $15 to $40 a month, and do the work yourself. This is real, and for some businesses it's enough. The catch is that "do the work yourself" is the expensive part. The subscription is cheap. Your forty hours fighting with it, and the fact that it'll still look like a template when you're done, is the cost that doesn't show up on the invoice.
The second is the build. This is someone who does it for you: writes the pages, sets up the structure, makes it work on a phone, makes sure Google can read it. For an owner-operated business this runs $2,000 to $6,000 depending on how many pages and how much of the writing and photography they handle versus you. This is where most trades and local service businesses should be.
The third is the brand. This is the build plus the decisions underneath it: what your business should actually say about itself, what it should look like, how it should sound. Positioning, logo, color, type. This runs $8,000 and up, because you're not paying for pages, you're paying for judgment about your business that takes years to develop. You need this less often than people selling it want you to believe. But when your problem is that nobody can tell what makes you different, no amount of new pages fixes that.
What actually drives the price
Four things move the number, and none of them is how pretty the site looks.
How many pages. A five-page site costs less than a ten-page site. Most local businesses need somewhere between five and eight: home, about, services, a gallery, contact, and maybe a page per major service. More than that and you're usually adding pages nobody reads.
Who writes it. Writing is the part owners underestimate. If you hand over finished copy and good photos, you're paying for the build. If you need someone to write it and direct the photography, that's more, because that's the hard part done well.
Whether the bones are good. If your current site is structurally fine and just looks dated, that's a refresh, and it's cheaper. If the structure itself is the problem, slow, broken on phones, invisible to Google, then rebuilding costs more than refreshing because there's nothing worth keeping.
Whether it needs to take money. A site that tells people what you do and gets them to call is words and pictures. It doesn't break. A site with a store, a cart, logins, or online booking has machinery behind it that breaks on a Sunday. That's a different, more expensive job, and most owner-operated businesses don't need it. If a visitor becoming a phone call is a win for you, you don't need the machinery.
What "cheap" actually costs
The $500 site and the free-with-subscription site aren't free. They cost you in a way that doesn't show up until later.
A cheap site is usually slow, usually looks wrong on a phone, and usually can't be found on Google, because the person who made it cheap made it cheap by skipping exactly those things. You don't see the cost because you can't see the customer who loaded your site on his phone, waited, and left. There's no invoice for the call you didn't get. That's the real price of the cheap site, and it's higher than the difference between $500 and $3,000. It just arrives quietly, one lost customer at a time.
This is the trap. The site looks fine to you, on your laptop, where you already know your own business. It doesn't look fine to the stranger on his phone deciding whether to call you or the next guy.
So what should you actually pay?
Here's the plain version, using real numbers.
| If your site… | You need a… | Ballpark |
|---|---|---|
| works, but looks like 2016 | Refresh | $2,500 |
| is the problem — slow, broken, invisible | Rebuild | $5,500 |
| can't say what makes you different | Rebrand | $9,500 |
Keeping any of them online, hosted, secure, and backed up, runs $150 to $350 a month. The full breakdown is on the pricing page — every number published, nothing negotiated.
But notice the move every one of those requires: knowing which problem you actually have. A refresh on a site that needed a rebuild is money wasted. A rebrand on a site that just needed faster load times is money wasted twice. The most expensive mistake isn't paying too much. It's paying for the wrong fix.
Anyone who quotes you a price before looking at your site is guessing. And anyone who promises you a specific number of new customers is guessing too. What an honest answer looks like is: here's what's actually wrong with your site, here's what it's costing you, and here's the specific fix and its fixed price. In that order. No discovery phase, no open-ended retainer, no surprises.
The one thing worth doing first
Before you spend anything on a new site, find out what's wrong with the one you have. Not your opinion of it, and not a salesperson's. The actual mechanics: how fast it loads, whether it works on a phone, whether Google can read it, whether a visitor has any reason to call you.
That's what the Audit is. For $750, we tell you exactly what's wrong with your site in plain English, what each problem is costing you, and what it would take to fix. If you decide to move forward, the $750 comes off the price of the work. You find out what you actually need before you pay to build anything, so you never pay for the wrong fix.