What a website should cost in 2026

Ask five people what a website costs and you will get five numbers between two hundred dollars and fifty thousand, all of them honest. That is not evasion. It is what happens when one word has to cover a five page brochure site and a booking system that talks to your accounting software.

So here is the actual landscape, with real numbers, and where I sit in it.

The four ways to get a website

Build it yourself: $200 to $600 a year. Squarespace runs about $16 to $49 a month depending on plan, Wix starts around $17, Webflow spans $17 to $159. Add a domain at $10 to $20 a year. That is the whole cost.

For a lot of businesses this is the correct answer, and I will say so on a call. If you need five pages, a contact form and a map, you do not need me. You need an afternoon and a template.

A marketplace freelancer: $1,500 to $8,000. Custom work, one person, wide quality range. The good ones are very good. The risk is not skill, it is continuity: when something breaks in eight months, the person who built it may not answer.

An independent developer: $4,000 to $12,000. Where I sit. One person who scopes it, builds it, hands it over and is still reachable afterwards. You are paying for judgment about what not to build as much as for the building.

An agency: $6,000 to $35,000 and up. Strategy, design, project management, several specialists. Genuinely worth it at a certain size. At small business size you are often paying for coordination between people who would not need coordinating if there were fewer of them.

Published 2026 guides tend to put the typical professional build somewhere between $3,000 and $15,000, which lines up with what I see.

What actually moves the number

Page count barely matters. These do:

Integrations. A site that stands alone is straightforward. A site that writes into your booking system, your invoicing, or your stock list is a different job, because now two systems have to agree forever.
Payments. Taking money adds tax rules, refunds, receipts and failure states. It roughly doubles a simple build.
Your content. If your copy and photographs exist, we start. If they do not, someone has to write and shoot them, and that someone charges.
Migration. Moving ten years of pages, with their search rankings intact, is real work that is invisible in the finished product.
How many people approve things. Two owners who disagree cost more than one owner who decides. Nobody quotes for this and everybody pays it.

The costs nobody puts in the quote

The build is a one time number. Running it is not:

Hosting: a few dollars a month for a small site, more with traffic
Domain: $10 to $20 a year
Maintenance: published rates for a small business site run $100 to $300 a month for managed care

I do not charge a retainer. Most people need me about twice a year, and they pay for those hours when they use them. If someone quotes you a monthly fee, ask what happens in a month where nothing breaks.

When you should not hire me

If your business is five pages of information and a phone number, use a builder. You will get online this week for the price of a coffee a month, and I would rather tell you that in a free half hour than take four thousand dollars for something a template does.

Custom starts making sense when a person in your business is doing something a computer should be doing. Retyping orders. Answering the same question at eleven at night. Copying numbers into a spreadsheet every Monday. At that point the site stops being a brochure and starts being a tool, and a tool is worth paying for.

What I charge

I do not start website projects under $4,000. Below that a template beats anything I would build, and I would be taking your money for the privilege.

Most land between $4,000 and $12,000. Automating a single workflow starts around $2,500. An assistant trained on your own material runs $5,000 to $10,000, plus what the model costs to run, which is usually tens of dollars a month rather than hundreds.

Those are ranges because the number depends on your actual situation, which is what the call is for. You get one fixed price in writing, three days after we talk, before you commit to anything. Not a rate card. Not an estimate that grows.

Delivery is usually three to eight weeks for a site. That is calendar time, not me sitting in a room for eight weeks. I run a small number of projects at once and you see progress every week.

How to read any quote you get

Three questions worth asking whoever you are talking to, me included:

Is this the price, or the starting price? "From $2,000" is a marketing number. Ask what the last three projects actually cost.
Who owns it when we are done? Code, domain, hosting account, analytics. All of it should be in your name. If it is not, you are renting.
What happens in month nine? When something breaks, who fixes it, how fast, and at what rate.

If the answers are vague, the price will be too.

The honest summary: a small business website in 2026 costs between nothing and a lot, and the only number that matters is the one written down for your job, before you say yes.