Nobody calls me with a realistic number in their head.
People arrive at one of two extremes. Half of them think a website should cost fifty or a hundred dollars — because what are you really doing, it's a few pages, how hard can it be. The other half have braced themselves for ten or twenty thousand and are already flinching before I say anything.
Here's the thing: both of those people are making the exact same mistake. Neither of them knows what's inside the box. And nobody in this industry seems willing to just tell you.
So I'm going to tell you. Real numbers, mine, including the cheap ones.
Both extremes are real prices. They're just for different jobs.
The reason you can't get a straight answer is that ‘a website’ describes about six completely different products. A one-page site that exists so people can find your phone number and leave you a review is a real thing that real businesses need. So is a custom application that runs your inventory, takes payments, and stores your customer data.
Those are not the same purchase, and pretending they belong on the same price list is how people end up either overpaying or buying something useless.
Two things drive the number: what you're building, and who you hire to build it. Let's do who you hire first, because that's the part most guides skip.
Who you hire changes the price more than what you build
Template builders ($0–$50/mo)
Wix, Squarespace, Shopify. You build it yourself. Real cost: roughly 20–40 hours of your time, $30–$50 a month, and a site that looks like a builder site to anyone who builds sites. Fine for a brochure. Not fine for a business that needs to rank locally or convert traffic. For the full head-to-head — including the cost nobody counts — see Wix vs. a custom website.
Freelancer ($800–$3,500 one-time)
Upwork or Fiverr. You'll get a working site — until you need to change something. Most freelancer relationships die within six months, because the freelancer either disappears or starts charging $100 an hour for five-minute changes. The price on the project itself is fair. The operating costs are where it falls apart.
Agency ($8,000–$60,000 one-time + monthly retainer)
Real custom work, long onboarding, polished outcome. The downside is that you're paying for an account manager, a project manager, three designers, two developers, and the office. Worth it for businesses doing $5M+ a year where every percentage point of conversion matters. Wildly overpriced for a local operator with a five-page site.
Founder-led studio ($150–$10,000 one-time + light monthly)
What I do. Custom work, no template, a real ongoing relationship, and the person who builds your site is the person who answers when something breaks. Pricing sits between freelancer and agency — agency quality of build at roughly half the cost, because there's no overhead to fund.
What I actually charge
Here are my real numbers, which is the part nobody publishes.
Template — $150
One page. I put your business name on it, your logo, your information, your colors. That's it. No revisions, no changes, no contact form. I'll help you get it hosted and you're live.
I want to be blunt about this one: most people don't need it. But it's genuinely the right call for a local business that needs one clean page so customers can find them and leave reviews — because reviews are how Google starts trusting a business, and a business with somewhere to point people accumulates them faster. It isn't the budget option. It's the review-engine option.
Starter — $1,200
Five custom pages, mobile-optimized, basic on-page SEO, and I'll set up your Google Business Profile. You also get a project dashboard with us if you want one.
This is where most people should start. If you have zero online presence, you're tight on budget, and you're not sure how any of this works, Starter is the honest answer. It covers the basics properly instead of half-covering everything.
Growth — $2,800
Up to ten pages, online booking, full local SEO, a monthly report, and priority support for the first month.
This is the most popular one, and it's for a business with a full operation behind it — you're migrating off a website builder, or you're stuck with an old site that's honestly a tier below Starter, and you're expanding. You need real SEO, more pages, and someone paying attention every month. If you take appointments, the booking piece usually pays for itself faster than owners expect; I ran the numbers on that in online booking ROI for service businesses.
Scale — $6,000
A custom web application. Third-party integrations, a dashboard or CRM, and I personally review the work. Roughly two revisions per phase.
A customer of mine makes cakes. She wanted everything in the palm of her hand — customer data, charging customers directly through her own system, sales history, inventory, orders, all of it. She could have used an off-the-shelf platform. She didn't want to, because she wanted her own rules, her own design, and a real brand feel instead of looking like every other storefront on the same template. That's Scale.
If that's the conversation you're actually having, it's a different budget: see how much a custom web app costs, and the difference between a web app and a website if you're not sure which one you need.
Custom — depends
Some projects come in cheaper than the tiers. Some come in higher. It depends on what you actually need, and I'd rather scope it honestly than force you into a box.
How I figure out which one you need
The first question I ask is whether you already have a site. Not to sell you a new one — to work out whether you need one at all.
Then I try to understand the business and what it needs right now to grow. That's the real question, and the answer isn't always a website.
The time I told a man not to hire me
A guy running a trucking company reached out. He was making money, he wanted to scale up, and he'd decided that meant branding and a full web application. He was ready to spend over ten thousand dollars.
I listened to him for a while, and his problem wasn't his website. His problem was staff. He didn't have enough people, and what he actually needed was more drivers and a stronger reputation as an employer.
So I told him: you don't need a website right now. Your industry isn't one where the website is the constraint — that's true for most of my customers, but it isn't true for you. Go hire people. Worry about this later, and expand on it when it matters.
I didn't take the project. I walked away from it.
I'm not telling you this to sound noble. I'm telling you because it's the difference between someone selling you a website and someone helping your business. I could make money just doing something. I'd rather actually move the needle for the person paying me. That's the same standard I think you should hold any studio to — there's a full checklist in what to expect from your web designer.
What nobody puts on the quote
The build price is not the whole picture, and this is where people get caught out.
- Domain and hosting. These are the real ongoing costs, and they're small. If you're not on a support plan, a small business is typically paying under a hundred dollars a year for hosting. In today's economy that's basically nothing.
- Email. Usually free. There are several good options that cost nothing, and most businesses never need to go beyond them. If you do need more, it's cheap.
- Monthly support. This is the one that surprises everybody.
The eight-hours-for-fifty-dollars problem
People expect monthly support to cost around fifty dollars.
For that fifty dollars, they're often imagining something like eight hours of work a month. I'll let you do that math yourself.
I'm not saying it to be harsh — it's a completely understandable assumption when nobody has ever explained what maintenance actually involves. But here's what my monthly plans cover: I pay for the server. I maintain everything. You have no headache whatsoever. And you get two small updates a month — change this text, swap that image, whatever you need.
- Starter: $150 a month for the first six months, then $200.
- Growth: $350 a month.
- Scale: $500 a month.
That intro rate on Starter exists because I'd rather help someone get properly started than squeeze them in month one. All of those are starting numbers, and they move depending on what you need.
Why this beats hiring a developer
I can't speak for other studios and I won't try to.
What I can tell you is what I do. I take the headache of your digital space off your plate. I advise you on what the next move should be and how to get there. I help you grow, improve, and actually be visible online.
Hiring a full-time software developer is expensive. Part-time and contract aren't cheap either. Having a technical person who knows what they're doing, who keeps getting better at it, and who is genuinely part of your team — at a fraction of that cost — is a different proposition entirely. That's the whole idea behind how we structure our web and cloud work.
So what should you budget?
Match the cost to the role the website plays in your business.
- Nothing online yet, local business: budget $1,200 and start with Starter.
- Real operation, current site is embarrassing you: budget $2,800.
- You need software, not a brochure: $6,000 and up.
- Running it yourself: add under a hundred a year for hosting. Otherwise a monthly plan so you never think about it.
If the site is mostly a brochure people find after they've already talked to you, a template is fine. If you expect Google to send you new customers every week, you need someone doing the work properly — and the price difference between a studio and an agency is the support model and how many people sit on your account.
And if you talk to me and it turns out you need to hire two more people instead of building a website, I'll tell you that, and it won't cost you anything.
I'm based in Buffalo Grove and work with businesses across Arlington Heights, Wheeling, and the rest of the Chicago suburbs, as well as clients nationally.
