What a website actually costs around here.
Nobody publishes prices, which is why this is the hardest thing to find out and the easiest place to get taken. Here is the whole market as far as I can see it, mine included, with the catch in each one.
The four ways to get a website, and what each really costs
1. Build it yourself on Wix, Squarespace or GoDaddy
Roughly $16 to $35 a month, forever. Call it $200 to $420 a year, so $1,000 to $2,100 over five years, plus your own time.
The catch is not the money, it is two other things. First, you never stop paying, and if you stop the site goes dark: the pages live on their platform, not on a domain you control, so there is often nothing to move. Second, the time. A shop owner building their own site loses a weekend, gets it eighty percent done, and leaves it there. I found a lot of eighty percent sites.
If you are going to do this properly, it is a legitimate choice and I will not talk you out of it. Just make sure the domain is registered in your name, not the platform's.
2. Hire a local freelancer
Usually $500 to $2,500 once. This is where I sit, at the bottom of it.
The catch is variance. You are buying one person, and you cannot tell from the outside whether that person will finish. The protections worth insisting on, from anybody including me: the domain registered in your name, a written scope before you pay, and something real you can look at rather than a slide deck.
3. Hire an agency
$2,500 to $15,000, plus a retainer. For a business doing serious volume this can be entirely worth it. They have a designer, a developer, someone who writes the words, and someone who answers the phone when one of them leaves.
The catch for a six-person shop in Valparaiso is that you are buying a process built for a much larger client, and a lot of what you pay for is coordination between people you will never meet.
4. Your nephew
Free, and then it costs more than any of the above. Not because he is not capable. Because in two years he has a job in Chicago and nobody knows where the domain is registered or what the login was. I have opened several of these. The site is fine. It is just unmaintainable and nobody can even find out who owns it.
What I charge
| Package | Price | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Digital Starter | $499 | One page covering everything a customer needs: what you do, where you are, hours, photographs, a tappable phone number and an enquiry form. Readable on a phone. Secure. |
| Smart Business | $899 | Several pages, your photographs treated properly, and room for services or a portfolio. |
| A change later | $45 | Per change request, or $150 for five banked against the year. |
| Annual checkup | $75 | Optional. I open it on a phone, check the links, the form and the renewal date, and tell you what I found. |
Paid once. There is no monthly fee coming to me, no retainer, and no percentage of anything. The domain and the site are registered in your name from the first day, so if you decide next year that you would rather somebody else looked after it, you take the whole thing and go. That is deliberate, and it is the part most worth checking against any other quote you get.
The costs that are not mine, and that nobody can avoid
| What | Real cost | Who you pay |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name | $10 to $20 a year | A registrar, directly, in your name. This is the one bill that matters. |
| Hosting | $0 for a static site | Cloudflare's free tier genuinely covers a small business site. |
| Business email | $0 to $12 a month | Optional. Forwarding to an address you already have is free. |
| Photography | $0 to several hundred | Your own phone, used carefully, is better than bad stock photographs. |
So the honest all-in for a small business site built this way is the one-time build plus about fifteen dollars a year. If a quote you are looking at has a monthly number on it, ask precisely what the monthly number buys and what happens to your site the month you stop paying it.
How to tell whether a price is fair
- Ask who the domain will be registered to. If the answer is anything other than you or your business, that is the whole negotiation.
- Ask what happens if you stop paying. A site that disappears was rented, not bought, and should be priced like rent.
- Ask to see something they built, on your phone. Not a screenshot. The live site, in your hand. Then try to tap the phone number.
- Ask what a change costs before you need one.
- Get the scope in writing first. Mine is published before you pay, which is the correct order.
A price for your actual business
Tell me what you do and roughly what the site needs to cover, and I will tell you which of the two it is, or that it is neither and here is a number. No call, no meeting.