Key takeaways
- A small business site from a competent freelancer lands somewhere around $3,000 to $8,000. A studio build for a company with real traffic sits closer to $15,000 to $45,000.
- Page count barely moves the number. Custom design, integrations and content are what move it.
- Budget 15 to 25 percent of the build cost per year for hosting, maintenance and content. Sites that skip this stop earning within eighteen months.
- The cheapest quote in a stack of three is usually the one that’s misunderstood the scope.
We’d rather not answer this with “it depends.” Below are actual numbers, what sits behind each one, and where they stop being true.
The short answer, by tier
| Who builds it | Typical range | What you get | Realistic timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| You, on a template | $0 to $500 | A working site in your own voice, on someone else’s layout | A weekend to a month |
| Freelancer | $2,000 to $10,000 | Customised template or light custom design, one point of contact | 3 to 8 weeks |
| Small studio | $10,000 to $50,000 | Custom design, strategy, content support, proper handover | 6 to 14 weeks |
| Agency | $50,000 to $250,000 | Research, design system, multi-stakeholder process, integrations | 3 to 9 months |
| Enterprise | $250,000 upward | Procurement, compliance, localisation, custom platform work | 6 months to 2 years |
Most businesses reading this belong in row two or three. The gap between them is the interesting part, because it isn’t quality of code. It’s whether anyone is being paid to think about the business before the design starts.
Under $500: the DIY tier
A Squarespace or Webflow subscription, a decent template, a domain, and your own weekend. Real cost is roughly $200 to $500 in year one, most of it recurring.
This is the right answer for a pre-revenue business, or for anyone who needs a credible presence before they know what the business is. Paying $12,000 to design a site around a positioning you’ll abandon in four months is worse than a template.
Where it stops working: when the site has to convert rather than exist, when you need something a template’s structure can’t express, or when the hours you spend fighting a page builder cost more than hiring someone. That last one arrives sooner than most founders admit.
$2,000 to $10,000: freelance
Huge range, and the ends are different products.
At $2,000 to $4,000 you’re buying template customisation. Someone takes a commercial theme, swaps in your brand, sets up five or six pages and hands it over. That’s a legitimate service and it’s what a lot of small businesses need. At that price you aren’t getting original design work, and a freelancer who claims otherwise is either undercharging badly or subcontracting.
At $6,000 to $10,000 you get real design decisions, a structure built around your business rather than around a demo, and usually some content help. One person, so it moves fast, and you’re never explaining yourself to a project manager who then explains it to a designer.
The risk is concentration. One person gets sick, takes a full-time job, or goes quiet, and you have a half-finished site and no leverage. Mitigate it with staged payments tied to deliverables and a written agreement that you own the files.
$10,000 to $50,000: studio work
The jump from freelance isn’t more pages. It’s the work that happens before anyone opens a design tool: who the site is for, what those people are trying to do, what the current site gets wrong, and what “working” would look like in numbers.
A studio engagement at this level typically includes discovery, a content structure you didn’t have to invent, custom design across the templates that matter, a build with components your team can recombine, SEO carried over properly, analytics configured to answer real questions, and a handover that means you can run the thing yourself.
It’s the right tier when the site is a meaningful part of how the business acquires customers. If your site produces leads that turn into revenue, spending $25,000 on it is a straightforward calculation, not a splurge. If it’s a brochure that three people a week look at, it isn’t.
Agency and enterprise
Above $50,000 the money is buying coordination as much as craft. Multiple stakeholders, brand governance, legal and accessibility review, integrations into a CRM or ERP that has its own rules, sometimes a dozen locales.
These budgets are justified when the complexity is real. They’re wasted when a company buys agency process for a twelve-page site because the agency’s client list looked impressive. If you’re at this tier, the thing to interrogate in a proposal is how many of the listed hours are production and how many are meetings.
What drives the number
Clients ask about page count first. It’s near the bottom of the list. These are the items that move a quote, roughly in order of impact.
- Custom design versus templated design. Original layouts, a type system, states and components for every context. This is usually the single biggest line.
- Content. If you supply finished copy, the project runs on schedule. If the studio writes it, add meaningfully to the budget. If it doesn’t get written, the project stalls for two months and the client blames the developer. Content is the most common reason builds go late.
- Integrations. A contact form is nothing. A booking system that checks live availability, a CRM sync, a payment flow with tax rules, a member area with permissions: each of these is a project inside the project.
- Unique page types. Twelve pages sharing three templates is cheap. Twelve pages that all look different is twelve designs.
- Migration. Moving 400 blog posts with their URLs, images and metadata intact is real work, and doing it badly is how businesses lose their organic traffic. Our website redesign checklist covers what has to survive the move.
- Approval layers. Every additional decision-maker adds revision rounds. A build signed off by one founder and the same build signed off by a committee are not the same job.
- Accessibility to a standard. Building sensibly is included in any decent quote. Auditing and certifying to WCAG AA with documentation is a separate scope.
- Animation. Considered motion on a few key moments is fine. Scroll-driven sequences that have to hold 60fps on a four-year-old Android phone will cost you.
The costs that don’t appear in the quote
Almost every “why did this cost more than I was told” conversation traces back to this list.
| Item | Typical annual cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | $12 to $60 | More for a premium TLD |
| Hosting | $120 to $1,200 | Managed hosting sits at the top of that range and is usually worth it |
| Platform subscription | $200 to $1,000 | Webflow, Shopify and similar |
| Premium plugins and licences | $100 to $800 | Forms, search, booking, SEO tooling |
| Photography | $500 to $5,000 one-off | The line clients cut first and regret most |
| Copywriting | $1,500 to $8,000 one-off | Only “free” if a director writes it, which costs more |
| Maintenance | $600 to $4,000 | Updates, backups, security, small fixes |
| Analytics and consent tooling | $0 to $600 | Consent management if you serve the EU or UK |
The rule of thumb worth internalising: plan for 15 to 25 percent of the build cost, every year, to keep the site working and growing. A $20,000 site with a $0 annual budget is a $20,000 asset depreciating on a two-year schedule.
One-off build or ongoing retainer?
The traditional model is a big build every three or four years with nothing in between. It’s popular because it fits how budgets get approved, and it’s usually the wrong shape.
What tends to work better: a leaner initial build that covers the pages that matter, then a monthly retainer that adds pages, improves what’s underperforming, and keeps the thing current. You spend roughly the same over four years and get a site that improves continuously rather than one that’s excellent for six months and embarrassing for thirty.
The exception is a genuine repositioning. New name, new market, new proposition: that’s a real project with a start and an end, and it deserves the full build.
How to read a proposal
Get three. Then compare them on the things that differ, not on the number at the bottom.
- Who writes the content, and is it in the price? The most common source of overrun.
- How many revision rounds, and what counts as one? “Unlimited revisions” means either an inflated price or a project that never ships.
- Who owns the files and accounts? If the studio holds the domain or hosting in its own name, walk.
- What happens after launch? Thirty days of fixes should be standard. Anything less means launch-day bugs become billable.
- Is SEO migration explicitly in scope? If a redesign proposal doesn’t mention redirects, it’s a proposal to lose your rankings.
- Can you edit it yourself? Ask to see the editing interface before signing, not after handover.
Two patterns to price with suspicion. A quote far below the others usually means the scope was read differently, and the difference resurfaces as change requests. A quote heavy on discovery hours for a simple site means you’re funding a process designed for larger clients.
Does AI make any of this cheaper?
It compresses some of the middle. First drafts, alternate layouts, boilerplate components, image variations: all faster than they were, and any studio still billing 2019 hours for that work is overcharging.
What it hasn’t compressed is the expensive part. Deciding what the site should say, what the structure should be, and which of the client’s assumptions are wrong still takes the same conversations it took in 2019. We went into where the line falls in AI in web design.
Practical effect on budget: expect faster delivery at the same tier rather than the same delivery at a lower tier. Sites that are visibly generated read as generated, and that shows up in how long people stay on them.
Three scenarios, priced
Local service business, six pages, needs the phone to ring. Build $4,000 to $8,000 with a good freelancer or a small studio. Photography $800. Copy either yours or $1,500. Ongoing $900 a year. Local search and the booking path decide whether it works, not the build.
B2B software company, twenty-five pages, a blog, CRM integration. Build $22,000 to $40,000. Content $4,000 to $10,000 depending on how much exists. Ongoing $6,000 a year including a monthly improvement allocation. Most of the value sits in the templates the marketing team will use fifty times, not the homepage the team argues about.
Established site, 300 posts, rebuilding without losing traffic. Build $18,000 to $35,000, of which a real slice is migration and redirect work. Skipping that slice to save $3,000 is the most expensive saving available in this industry.
Quick answers
Can I get a decent website for $1,000?
You can get a decent template site you set up yourself for a fraction of that. What you can’t get for $1,000 is someone else doing custom work, because it’s below the cost of the hours involved. If a quote comes in there, find out what’s being delivered.
Why do quotes for the same brief vary by 10x?
Because they’re not the same brief once each party has interpreted it. One assumes you supply content and it’s a theme customisation. Another assumes original design, copywriting and a migration. Send all three the same written scope and the spread narrows fast.
Should I pay monthly or upfront?
Staged payments tied to deliverables are the healthiest structure: deposit, design approval, build complete, launch. Be careful with “website subscriptions” that never transfer ownership, because you can end up renting your own site permanently.
How long should a website last?
Four to six years for the underlying structure if it’s maintained. Visual refreshes every two or three. Sites that need a full rebuild after eighteen months usually sat on a template that couldn’t stretch, or went unmaintained.
Is WordPress cheaper than Webflow or Shopify?
Lower licence cost, higher maintenance cost. Over five years the totals land close together. Choose on what your team can operate, not on the platform fee.
What if I already have a site and want it better?
Often the best value on this page. Targeted work on the pages that already get traffic beats a full rebuild for a fraction of the cost. Start by finding out which pages earn their keep, then fix those. The principles we build on apply to an improvement pass as much as to a new build.
Wanna get to werk?
Tell us what the site needs to do and we’ll tell you what tier it belongs in, including when that answer is “not us.” Rough numbers in the first conversation, no discovery invoice to find out whether we’re a fit.