Most websites that answer this question don’t actually answer it. They say “it depends,” list some factors, and invite you to get in touch.
Here’s the direct version: most small business websites land somewhere between $1,500 and $15,000. That’s a wide range because it covers three genuinely different kinds of businesses selling three genuinely different things. Once you know which one you’re talking to, the number stops being mysterious.
The three kinds of people you can hire
Solo freelancers — roughly $1,500 to $5,000. One person, working alone, usually handling two to four projects at a time. You talk directly to the person building your site, which is the main advantage. The main risk is reliability rather than skill: a meaningful share of solo projects stall out or go quiet partway through, and there’s no team to absorb it when the one person gets sick, busy, or overwhelmed.
Agencies — roughly $6,000 to $15,000, sometimes far more. A team, typically three to twenty people, with account managers, designers, and developers. Quality tends to be consistent and timelines tend to be slower. The tradeoff most people don’t anticipate: the person who sells you the project usually isn’t the person who builds it, so what you saw in the pitch and what you get can drift.
Productized services — often $500 to $1,500 up front, plus a monthly fee. Fixed scope, fixed price, fast turnaround. The low headline number usually comes with a recurring maintenance or hosting subscription attached, and that’s where the real cost lives. Worth doing the arithmetic: $99/month for three years is $3,564 on top of the build.
None of these is the “right” answer. They’re built for different situations, and the cheapest option is only cheap if it’s the one that fits.
What actually moves the price
Page count matters less than people expect. What actually drives cost:
How much thinking the content needs. A site where you hand over finished copy and photos costs less than one where someone has to figure out what your services even are, how to describe them, and how they should be organized. This is usually the single biggest hidden variable.
Whether anything has to work. A contact form is trivial. Online booking, payments, customer logins, or a searchable inventory each add real build time and real ongoing failure modes.
How custom the design is. A tweaked template is fast and cheap and looks like a tweaked template. A design built specifically around your business takes longer and doesn’t look like everyone else’s.
How clear you are on what the site is for. This one surprises people. A business that arrives knowing what the site needs to do — which services matter most, what a visitor should do first, what makes them different from the shop down the road — moves fast. A business still deciding pays for the deciding, because someone has to do that thinking, and thinking is the expensive part.
How many rounds of changes are included. Revision rounds are where scope quietly balloons. “Unlimited revisions” usually means the price already assumes a lot of them.
Who supplies the photography. Stock photos are free-ish and generic. Real photos of your actual work are more persuasive than anything a designer can do. But photos are also the single most common thing that stalls a project, and handing them over isn’t the end of it — images almost always need cropping, resizing, and colour correction to sit properly in a layout. Dropping a raw phone photo straight into a page and hoping it looks right is a large part of why some sites look amateur.
The questions that tell you what you’re really buying
Two projects can carry identical price tags and be wildly different deals. These are the questions that surface the difference:
“What happens when I need a change in six months?” Some builds you can update yourself. Some require the original developer. Some require an active subscription or the site goes away. This is the single most expensive thing to get wrong, and it rarely comes up during the sale.
“Do I own this?” Ask specifically about the domain, the content, and the site files. If cancelling a monthly fee means losing your website, that’s not ownership — it’s a rental with a large deposit.
“Who’s actually building it?” Worth asking directly at agencies. The answer is often reasonable; the surprise is what stings.
“What’s not included?” Good answers here are specific and volunteered before you ask. Vague answers are a preview of how scope disagreements will go later.
“What do you need from me, and when?” Projects stall on client-side content far more often than on developer capacity. A firm that can’t answer this hasn’t run enough projects.
When you shouldn’t hire anyone
If your business is brand new, unvalidated, and you mostly need to exist online — a site builder you set up yourself is genuinely the right call. Spending $3,000 to test whether a business idea works is a bad use of $3,000.
Hiring someone makes sense when the website has an actual job: bringing in leads you’re currently missing, or representing work that’s better than your current site suggests. If you can’t articulate what the site is supposed to do, that’s worth resolving before you spend money on it.
Where TruePoint sits
We publish our pricing because hiding it mostly serves the seller. Three fixed scopes — $1,500, $3,000, and $4,500 — agreed before any work begins, with no monthly retainer required to have a website built.
That’s freelancer-range pricing with productized clarity, without the subscription that usually comes attached. You own the domain, the content, and the site itself. Nothing stops working if you stop paying us, because there’s nothing to stop paying.
On support: anything in the agreed scope that isn’t working correctly gets fixed free for 30 days after launch. After that, fixes and changes are quoted per job, with no retainer. We can do that because these are static sites — no database, no CMS, no plugins — so there’s very little that can break on its own. Most “maintenance plans” exist to maintain the fragility of the platform underneath them.
If you’re weighing scopes, the website packages page lists exactly what’s in each one. If you’d rather just describe your situation and get a straight recommendation, the project form takes a few minutes and costs nothing.