Ask four people to quote the same website and you can get four numbers that do not appear to describe the same job. That is not because three of them are lying. It is because “a website” describes anything from a one-page template to a custom build with a content system behind it.
The tiers, honestly
Broadly there are four things being sold under the same word.
- Do it yourself on a site builder. Cheapest, and fine for validating an idea. You are paying with your own time, and the ceiling is low.
- A template customised by a freelancer. Reasonable value. The risk is that the template decided the layout before anyone knew what you sell.
- A custom build. Designed and coded for your business, structured so it can rank and be read. This is where most serious small and mid-sized businesses land.
- Full agency engagement with research, brand work and a long process. Real value at real scale, and heavily oversold below that scale.
For reference, our own custom builds start at $2,000. We publish the starting number rather than a range because a range wide enough to be honest is too wide to be useful.
What actually moves the price
Four things, in roughly this order of impact:
- How many pages genuinely need to exist. A five-page site and a fifty-page site are not the same build, and the difference is not linear.
- Whether the content exists. Writing the pages is frequently the single largest hidden cost, and it is the thing most quotes quietly exclude.
- Whether anything has to connect to anything else. Booking, payments, inventory, a CRM. Each integration is a small project.
- Whether it is being designed for you or adapted from something existing.
The cheapest quote and the most expensive quote are usually both describing work nobody has fully specified yet.
The costs that arrive after launch
This is where people get caught, because the build fee is the number everyone compares and the ongoing costs are the ones nobody mentions.
- Hosting, which should be in your own name so you are never locked out of your own site.
- Your domain, renewed annually.
- Maintenance and support, if you want it. Ours is $300 a month and it is genuinely optional. The site does not stop working without it.
- Content changes. Ask whether you can make them yourself, because paying a developer to change a phone number gets old immediately.
The question that reveals the most
Ask what happens to the price if you change your mind halfway through. A fixed price agreed against a written scope is a very different arrangement from an hourly rate, and hourly billing turns a website into a meter you cannot read.
Then ask who owns it at the end. The code, the hosting account, the domain, the content system. If any of those live in the agency’s account rather than yours, the price you were quoted is not the price you will eventually pay.
What to check before you sign
- Is SEO structure part of the build, or quoted again afterwards? It should be part of it. Here’s why.
- Can you edit your own content without a developer?
- Is there a fixed price against a written scope?
- Do you own the code, the hosting and the domain outright?