Real numbers, not “contact us for pricing.” What DIY builders actually cost, what freelancers and agencies charge, what we charge, and what to walk away from.
A professionally built website for a small business costs $1,500 to $5,000 one time, plus $15 to $60 a month to host and maintain it. That is the honest middle of the market, and it covers the overwhelming majority of local businesses: contractors, law offices, clinics, restaurants, shops, salons, churches, and service companies with one or two locations.
The reason nobody wants to say that out loud is that the number is genuinely a range, and the range is wide because “a website” describes anything from a single page with your hours to a booking system tied to your calendar and your CRM. So most web companies do the cowardly thing and put “contact us for pricing” on the page, which wastes your afternoon and tells you nothing.
Here is everything we know about what websites cost, including the parts that are inconvenient for us to admit. If you want to skip straight to our numbers, they are $1,499 for a starter site and $3,499 for a business site, quoted as a fixed figure in writing before anybody starts work.
Four Ways to Get a Website
| Route | Typical price | The part nobody mentions | Who it fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder | $16 - $49/mo | plus 25-60 hours of your time | Testing an idea, side business, one page of hours and a phone number |
| Freelancer | $500 - $5,000 | one time, quality varies enormously | A small site when you can vet the person and their work is still online |
| Local design shop | $1,500 - $6,000 | one time, plus $25-$60/mo care | Most established small businesses with services to sell and towns to cover |
| Agency | $8,000 - $50,000+ | one time, plus retainer | Multi-location brands, complex applications, in-house marketing teams |
Wix and Squarespace advertise a headline price that is real, and then the number people actually pay is different. Squarespace business plans run roughly $23 to $36 a month billed annually. Wix business plans run roughly $17 to $36. GoDaddy’s builder is cheaper and shows it. Call the platform $300 a year, which is $1,500 over five years before anything else.
Then come the add-ons. A real booking app, a form tool that does more than email you plain text, a review widget, an email marketing tool, and a popup app are each $5 to $30 a month. Owners running an actual business on a builder commonly sit at $50 to $90 a month all in, which is $3,000 to $5,400 over five years.
And then there is your time, which is the part that never appears in a comparison chart. Building a first site yourself takes most people 25 to 60 hours spread across evenings. Not because the tools are hard, but because writing the words, cropping the pictures, deciding what goes on which page, and fixing the layout that looks fine on your laptop and broken on your phone all take longer than anyone expects. At $50 an hour of your own time that is $1,250 to $3,000 of unbilled labor.
None of this makes builders a bad deal. It makes the sticker price fiction. If you enjoy the work, have the evenings, and your website is not how customers find you, a builder is a perfectly good answer and we will tell you so on the phone. We wrote a longer, fairer breakdown of exactly where the ceiling is on our custom website vs. DIY builders comparison.
Freelance web designers are the widest quality band in this entire market. At the low end, $500 to $1,200 typically buys a purchased template with your logo and text dropped in, delivered in a week. That can genuinely be fine for a simple business, and we have seen good work at that price from people who are honest about what it is.
At the higher end, $2,500 to $5,000 buys a good independent designer doing real custom work, often better and more personal than an agency would deliver for twice that. The catch with freelancers has never really been the build. It is what happens 18 months later. People take full-time jobs, have babies, move, or simply stop answering. The single most common call we get from a new customer is some version of the guy who built our site quit replying, we do not know who has the domain, and nobody can log in.
If you go the freelance route, protect yourself with three things: your domain registered in your own name on your own card, a written scope with a revision count, and a copy of the site files and database handed to you at launch. Any freelancer worth hiring will agree to all three without blinking.
A real agency puts a project manager, a designer, a developer, a copywriter, and a QA pass on your project, and it charges accordingly. For a company with multiple locations, a complicated product catalog, a brand system to maintain, or an application behind the marketing site, that structure earns its money.
For a twelve-person business in a small town, it usually does not. You are paying for account management you do not need, discovery workshops that produce a deck, and an office lease in a city you do not live in. The website that comes out the other end is frequently very good and frequently three times the price of an equally effective site built by somebody smaller.
The tell is in the proposal. If a large share of the line items describe process rather than pages, you are buying process. That is a legitimate purchase at a certain size of company, and a waste of money below it.
Starter Site, from $1,499. Up to five pages with a custom mobile-first design, contact form and click-to-call, Google Maps and hours, on-page SEO and schema markup, SSL and launch setup. This is the right size for a business with one location and one core service that mainly needs to be found and called.
Business Site, from $3,499. Eight to fifteen pages with a page for each service and each town you cover, copywriting included, photo sourcing and optimization, a blog or news section, advanced SEO and schema, analytics and Search Console, and lead notifications straight to your phone. This is what most established businesses with a service area actually need.
Custom and e-commerce, quoted after a free consult. Online stores, customer portals, booking systems, CRM integrations, and custom applications. Stores generally start around $6,000. We will not pretend to price this from a web page, because the honest range is too wide to be useful.
Every one of those is a fixed number in writing before we start, with a page-by-page plan attached. No hourly meter, no scope-creep invoice at the end. See the full package detail on our website design page.
What Moves the Number
If two quotes for the same project differ by $3,000, the difference is almost always hiding in one of these six.
Every page needs a layout, copy, images, and testing. Five pages is a weekend of design work. Eighteen pages with a service page per trade and a location page per town is a different project entirely, and it is usually the right project for a business that covers a region.
This is the most underestimated line item on every quote. Writing twelve pages of clear, specific text about a business somebody did not know a month ago takes days, not hours. If you supply finished copy, the price drops. If you supply a folder of old brochures and a phone call, somebody has to turn that into pages.
Stock photos are cheap and look it. A photographer spending half a day at your shop, your job site, or with your staff runs $400 to $1,200 and is routinely the single best-spent money in the entire project. Real photos of real people in your actual building outperform everything else on a local business site.
E-commerce, payments, booking, memberships, and customer accounts all have to be configured, tested end to end, and secured. An online store starts around $6,000 not because the design is harder but because products, payment processing, shipping rules, and tax settings are four separate projects wearing one coat.
Moving 200 existing URLs means inventorying every one of them, mapping redirects, and preserving the pages that already earn traffic. Skipping that step is the most common way a redesign quietly destroys rankings a business spent years building.
A normal build runs three to five weeks. Compressing that into ten days means somebody works nights, and rush pricing reflects it. If you have a hard opening date, tell us the date up front and we will schedule backward from it instead of charging you for the panic.
The Part After Launch
A website is not a purchase, it is a small piece of infrastructure. These are the recurring costs, and every one of them is real whether or not anybody warned you.
| Cost | Typical price | What to know |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name | $12 - $25 per year | Renewed annually. Must be registered in your name, not your designer’s. |
| Budget shared hosting | $5 - $15 per month | Oversold servers, no monitoring, nobody notices an outage before you do. |
| Managed hosting and care | $25 - $100 per month | SSL, daily backups, updates, malware scanning, uptime monitoring, support. |
| Our care plan | $49 per month | All of the above plus monthly content changes and a local number to call. |
| Business email on your domain | $6 - $8 per mailbox/month | Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. Not included in hosting anywhere reputable. |
| Ongoing SEO and content | $400 - $2,500 per month | Optional and separate. Plenty of local businesses do fine without it for years. |
We bundle hosting, SSL, backups, updates, monitoring, and content changes into one $49 a month line so there is one bill and one number to call. The full breakdown lives on our website maintenance page, and the server side is detailed under managed web hosting.
Before You Sign
A low price is not a red flag by itself. These six are, and they show up together more often than not.
If nothing states the page count and the number of revision rounds, the cheap quote is cheap because it is small, and you will find out how small in week three.
At $199 a month that is $7,164 over the term, you never own the files, and cancelling means you no longer have a website. Ask one question: if I cancel, do I keep the site?
A shocking number of businesses discover years later that their domain is registered to a designer who has stopped answering email. The domain belongs in your name, on your credit card, always.
You will change your hours, add a staff photo, and run a seasonal promo. If nobody will tell you what those cost before you sign, the answer is "whatever we feel like."
If your existing site has real traffic and the quote never mentions 301 redirects, the launch will erase it. This is the single most expensive omission in cheap redesign quotes.
Click through every example. If half of them are parked domains or "site temporarily unavailable," the work did not survive contact with real businesses.
Do the Five-Year Math
The one-time price is the least interesting number in this entire decision. Here is the five-year picture, including the column most comparisons leave out.
| Path | Up front | Recurring | Your hours | Five-year total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder | $0 build | $30/mo platform and apps | 40 hrs build + 6 hrs/yr upkeep | $1,800 cash + ~$3,500 of your time |
| Cheap $600 freelance site | $600 build | $10/mo shared hosting | Rebuild in year 2 or 3 is typical | $1,200 cash, plus a second build |
| Hughes starter site | $1,499 build | $49/mo care plan | Roughly zero hours of yours | $4,439 over five years |
| Hughes business site | $3,499 build | $49/mo care plan | Roughly zero hours of yours | $6,439 over five years |
Read that table and the conclusion is not “the expensive option wins.” It is that the paths cost roughly the same money and differ enormously in who spends the hours and what ceiling you hit in year three.
The other number missing from every version of this table is what the website earns. A contractor whose site brings in two extra jobs a month has paid for a $3,499 build several times over before the first care-plan renewal. A shop whose site is a digital business card has not, no matter what it cost. That is the actual question worth arguing about, and it is the one we start with on the phone.
FAQ
For a typical small business with a handful of services and one location, a professionally built website costs between $1,500 and $5,000 one time, plus $15 to $60 a month for hosting and maintenance. A five-page site for a contractor, salon, attorney, or restaurant usually lands in the $1,500 to $2,500 range. Once you need service pages for several towns, real copywriting, a blog, and booking or quote workflows, you are in the $3,500 to $6,000 range. Below about $800 you are almost always buying a template with your logo dropped in it, and above about $10,000 for a simple local business you are usually paying for agency overhead rather than a better website. Our own starting prices are $1,499 for a starter site and $3,499 for a business site, quoted as a fixed number in writing before any work begins.
Because the phrase "build me a website" describes ten different amounts of work. A $600 quote usually means a stock template, your own text pasted in, and no strategy, no revisions, and no support after launch. A $3,500 quote usually includes discovery, custom layout, professional copywriting, image work, SEO structure, form and analytics setup, testing, and a launch plan. A $25,000 quote usually includes a project manager, a designer, a developer, a copywriter, a QA pass, and an office lease baked into the rate. None of those are scams. They are different products. The way to compare quotes fairly is to ask each provider for the page count, who writes the copy, how many revision rounds are included, what happens to your old URLs, who hosts it, and what a change costs after launch. Once those five answers are on the table, the prices usually make sense.
Cheaper up front, yes. Cheaper over five years, usually not, and it depends heavily on what your time is worth. Squarespace business plans run roughly $23 to $36 a month billed annually, and Wix business plans run roughly $17 to $36. Call it $300 a year, or $1,500 over five years, before any paid apps. Add a booking app, a form app, a review widget, and an email tool and $10 to $60 a month more is normal. Then add your own hours. Owners routinely spend 25 to 60 hours building a first site themselves. At a conservative $50 an hour of your own time, that is $1,250 to $3,000 of labor you did not invoice anybody for. The builder is genuinely the right answer for some businesses, but "it is only $16 a month" is not the real number.
Budget hosting starts around $5 to $15 a month, which buys you shared space on an oversold server with no monitoring and no one looking at your site until you notice it is down. Managed hosting with SSL, daily backups, caching, malware scanning, and uptime monitoring runs $25 to $100 a month depending on traffic and complexity. Our care plan starts at $49 a month and includes hosting, SSL, daily backups with 30-day retention, software and security updates, malware scanning, uptime monitoring, monthly content changes, and local phone support. Separate from hosting, budget $12 to $25 a year for your domain name and, if you use business email on your domain, roughly $6 to $8 per mailbox per month.
Six things move the number more than anything else. Page count is the obvious one, because every page needs a layout, copy, and images. Copywriting is the second, and it is the most commonly underestimated: writing twelve pages of clear, specific text about a business you did not know last month is real work. Third is anything transactional, meaning e-commerce, payments, booking, memberships, or customer accounts, because those have to be configured, tested, and secured. Fourth is integration with software you already run, such as a CRM, a scheduling system, or an inventory feed. Fifth is migration from an old site, especially preserving hundreds of existing URLs. Sixth is photography. Stock images are free or cheap; a photographer spending half a day at your shop is $400 to $1,200 and is often the single best money spent on the whole project.
A restaurant that needs a menu, hours, photos, a map, and online ordering links is usually a $1,500 to $2,500 project, because the content is simple and the visual quality of the food photos carries the site. A contractor or trades business covering several towns needs individual service pages and location pages plus a gallery and review section, which usually puts it in the $2,500 to $4,500 range. A law office or medical practice tends to land in the $3,000 to $6,000 range because the copy has to be careful, there are often several attorneys or providers to profile, and intake forms need to handle sensitive information properly. An online store starts around $6,000 because product setup, payment processing, shipping rules, and tax configuration are each their own small project.
Watch for six specific things. First, no written scope, meaning nothing says how many pages you get or how many revisions are included. Second, a monthly "website plan" with a 36-month or 48-month contract where you never own the site and stop having a website the day you stop paying. Third, no mention of who owns the domain, because a surprising number of businesses discover their domain is registered in their old designer's name. Fourth, per-page or per-change fees after launch with no published rate. Fifth, no plan for redirects from your existing URLs, which is how a redesign quietly destroys the rankings you already had. Sixth, a portfolio full of sites that are no longer online, which usually means the work did not survive contact with real businesses.
Pay once for the build and monthly for hosting and care. That is the arrangement that leaves you in control. The rent-a-website model, where a company charges $150 to $300 a month with no build fee, sounds friendly and works out badly: over three years you pay $5,400 to $10,800, you never own the files, and leaving means starting from zero. There are legitimate reasons to spread a build cost over a few payments, and we do that regularly, but there is a real difference between financing a site you own and renting one you never will. Ask one question of any monthly offer: if I cancel, do I keep the website? If the answer is no, price it as rent, not as a purchase.
A redesign usually costs the same as a new build, sometimes slightly more. That surprises people, because it feels like the hard part is done. In practice you are doing all of the new-build work plus an inventory of every existing URL, a redirect map so the old addresses still land somewhere sensible, content migration, and careful preservation of any pages that already rank. If your existing site is small and the content is still accurate, a refresh instead of a redesign is often the better buy: new layout, new images, speed and mobile fixes, and a security cleanup for a fraction of a rebuild. We will look at what you have and tell you which one you actually need, including when the honest answer is the cheaper one.
The technical foundation should be, and in our builds it is: fast page speed, mobile-first layout, clean heading structure, page titles and meta descriptions written for real searches, schema markup, an XML sitemap, and Google Search Console and Analytics connected before launch. Ongoing SEO is a separate service and a separate budget, because it is separate work: monthly content, review generation, Google Business Profile management, citations, and link building. If a quote says "SEO included" without specifying which of those it means, ask. In a lot of cheap quotes "SEO included" means somebody typed keywords into a meta keywords tag that search engines stopped reading in 2009.
Take a $3,500 professional build with a $49 a month care plan. Over five years that is $3,500 plus $2,940 in care plus about $90 in domain renewals, or roughly $6,530 total, and every hour of maintenance, updating, and monitoring in that window is somebody else's problem. Now take the DIY path: $30 a month for the platform and apps, or $1,800 over five years, plus the 40 hours you spent building it and the four to eight hours a year you spend maintaining it. At $50 an hour that is another $3,000 to $4,000 of your own time, putting you in the same neighborhood financially, with a site that is harder to rank and cannot be moved off the platform. The gap is not really money. It is who spends the hours and what ceiling you hit later.
Yes, always fixed and always in writing before we start. You get a page-by-page plan, what is included, what is not, and one number. There is no hourly meter and no scope-creep invoice at the end. If you ask for something new mid-project, we quote that separately so you can decide. Getting the quote is a phone call or a conversation at your place of business, usually 20 to 30 minutes, and it costs nothing. Call (270) 807-1000 or use the form on this page. If the honest recommendation is that you need less than you asked for, or that a DIY builder would serve you better right now, we will tell you that instead of selling you a project.
Pricing is one piece. These go deeper on the decisions behind it.
Our packages, process, portfolio, and what a build actually includes.
An honest look at Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy, including who should use them.
What the $49 a month care plan covers and why maintenance is not optional.
The hosting side: servers, SSL, backups, and free migration from your host.
Tell us what your business does and what you want the site to accomplish. You get a page-by-page plan and one fixed price in writing. If the honest answer is that you need less than you asked for, we say so.
Murray, KY 42071 • Serving Calloway County and western Kentucky
Fixed prices in writing since 2015
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