What a small business website actually costs.

If you've been quoted in the last six months, your quote probably fell into one of four bands. Each band represents a different kind of operator on the supplier side, not a different kind of website. The site you launch in each band has a comparable user experience; what changes is performance, integrations, longevity, and ownership.

Band one is the DIY tier — $0 to $1,500. You use Squarespace, Wix, or GoDaddy's site builder, you pick a template, you swap in your own copy and photos. It works for a one-person operation or a brand-new business testing whether the model itself is viable. The site looks like a template, ranks barely in search, and runs about three to five seconds load time on mobile.

Band two is the local template shop — $3k to $6k. A one or two-person shop, often working out of a coffee shop or a home office, builds you a Squarespace or Wix site with a custom template. Reasonable design, reasonable speed, but the integrations are limited to whatever the platform's marketplace covers, and the SEO infrastructure is basic. Common for service businesses, professional practices, and starter operations.

Band three is the custom build — $8k to $22k. Founder-led studio (like us) or a small agency. Custom design, custom code, real performance (under one-second load times), real SEO infrastructure, and the integrations your operation actually needs — booking flows, custom dashboards, payment processing, SMS reminders. The site lasts four to six years before warranting a rebuild.

Band four is the agency engagement — $35k to $80k+. Multi-person team, formal discovery phase, brand-book deliverables, account management. Right for large operators ($30M+ revenue), multi-stakeholder projects, or work that needs deep brand strategy. Overkill for most mid-market businesses.

Within any single band, the price moves based on five factors. Knowing these helps you read a quote and tell whether the studio is padding the number or sized correctly for the work.

First — page count. A six-page marketing site is cheaper than a sixteen-page site. Most studios price per page or per route. Adding a service-area page or a team-bio page is incremental; adding a full e-commerce catalog or a custom admin panel is a category jump.

Second — integrations. A contact form that sends an email is included in every quote. A Hostaway booking integration, a Stripe deposit flow, a Twilio SMS sequence, or a Toast menu pull — each one adds real engineering work. A studio quoting band three for a band-four integration scope is going to come back asking for more money.

Third — content. Are you providing the copy and photography, or are we writing it and coordinating the photographer? A studio that includes copywriting and photography direction in the project fee is doing work most template shops don't. Look at the quote and see what's actually inside.

Fourth — timeline pressure. A four-week shipdate costs more than a twelve-week one because the studio has to free up calendar to focus on it. Most of our work runs four to six weeks; we don't discount for stretched timelines because we'd rather ship and move on.

Fifth — brand complexity. A site that uses your existing brand assets is faster to build than one that requires us to design the brand from scratch. Bundling brand + site is efficient (one studio, one timeline) but adds real cost compared to a pure web engagement on an existing brand.

The cheap-quote red flags are surprisingly consistent. If the studio is selling you a custom site for under $5k and promising real integrations, performance, and SEO ranking — they're either going to use a template behind the scenes and call it custom, or the project is going to balloon mid-engagement when the real scope becomes clear.

The expensive-quote red flags are subtler. Multiple-page proposals, paid discovery phases, a six-week kickoff before any code gets written — these are signs you're paying for agency machinery you don't need. Mid-market operators don't need a brand strategist's third revision of a positioning workshop deck before the site can ship.

Honest middle-band quotes (band three, $8k to $22k) tend to read simply. Here's what we'll build, here's the timeline, here's the fixed fee, here are the milestones, here's what's not included. If your quote reads like that and the studio's previous work shows real outcomes for operators like you, the number is probably fair.

Our pricing lives at /pricing and reads in full. Tier 1 (Foundation) is $8k starting — a brand-grade marketing site, up to 8 routes, shipped in 3-4 weeks. Tier 2 (Studio) is $15-22k — brand + site + photography coordination + booking or intake flow integrated, shipped in 5-6 weeks. Tier 3 (Software) is scope-based for custom internal tools and dashboards.

Above and beyond those, the third-party SaaS your site runs on (hosting, email, SMS, etc.) gets billed directly to you by the respective vendors — we never mark up vendor invoices. Photography vendors are coordinated by us if you want, hired direct if you'd rather.

If you're shopping multiple quotes and want a sanity check, send us the others. We'll give you an honest read on whether we'd compete for the project or recommend a better-fit builder.