Pricing
How much does a website cost in 2026?
It's the first question every business owner asks, and the honest answer — "it depends" — helps nobody. So here are the real ranges I see from inside the industry, what actually drives them, and the costs that almost never make it into the initial quote.
The four price tiers
DIY site builders ($0–$35/month plus your time). Wix, Squarespace and friends. The money you save in cash, you pay in evenings. Fine for validating an idea; painful once you care about how you look on Google, because template sites carry template limits.
Freelancers (roughly $300–$1,500). The wild card tier. You can find genuinely great freelancers here, but you're buying one person's availability. Ask what happens when they're on holiday and your booking form breaks.
Small studios (roughly $1,000–$5,000). This is where I sit — I run a small studio myself, Nexa Dev Studio, and our small-business builds range from a few hundred dollars for a sharp one-pager to four figures for a full platform. The value of this tier isn't the pixels; it's that someone thinks about your Google presence, your speed, and your customers' phones from day one, not as an afterthought.
Agencies ($5,000 and up, way up). You're paying for account managers, strategy decks and a building. Sometimes that's exactly what a mid-size company needs. For a restaurant or a two-person brand, it's usually paying for overhead you'll never touch.
What you're actually paying for
Nobody is paying $2,000 for "a website" — five pages of HTML cost close to nothing. You're paying for the decisions: what the site says, what it asks visitors to do, how it performs on a three-year-old Android over 4G, whether Google can read it, and who fixes it in month seven. The build is the visible ten percent.
The ongoing costs nobody quotes upfront
- Domain: $10–15/year. Own it yourself — if your developer registers it under their name, you don't own your own address.
- Hosting: $0–20/month for a small business site. Static sites can genuinely host for free on Cloudflare Pages; a WordPress site on decent managed hosting runs $15–30/month.
- Maintenance: updates, backups, small edits. Either budget hours monthly or agree upfront on how changes get handled.
- Email: if you want hello@yourbusiness.com, that's another few dollars a month.
When cheap gets expensive
The expensive "cheap website" follows a pattern: a $300 template dump that loads in nine seconds, ranks for nothing, and gets quietly rebuilt a year later — total cost, two websites. The pattern I'd watch for: monthly lock-in contracts you can't leave with your content, no access to the domain, and a quote that never mentions who owns the files.
How to buy well at any budget
Ask three questions before signing anything. One: can I see live sites you built, on my phone, right now? Two: who owns the domain and the files? Three: what happens after launch — what's included and what bills hourly? A builder who answers those three comfortably is quoting you a real service, whatever the number is.