What should a website actually cost you?
Five questions. Then an honest, itemized cost for all five realistic paths: a website builder, AI plus your own hosting, a freelancer, an agency, or us. Every figure is a range, and we show you which numbers are published list prices and which are our own estimates.
Your estimate
Three-year total cost, low to high
Each bar is the full range for that path, not a single number. The scale is logarithmic, which is the only way a $36 bar and a $100,000 bar fit on the same line. A bar that fades out and says and up has real costs we cannot put a number on, so treat its position as a floor rather than a total.
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One line on this page is $129 a year
That is ours for a business website, and it is the whole bill: the build, the design, your domain, hosting, SSL, and a team keeping it online and up to date. We build your site first and show it to you live. If you do not love it, you walk away and pay nothing.
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How we worked these numbers out
An estimate you cannot check is worth nothing, so here is the whole method. Two different kinds of number go into it, and we keep them separate on purpose: prices we take straight from a published source, and scaling judgements we made ourselves. Anywhere a real cost genuinely varies you get a range instead of a made-up single figure.
Published prices, used as-is
- Website builder plans at the providers' own annual list prices: Wix Light $192, Wix Core $228, Wix Business $420, Squarespace Personal $192, Squarespace Business $288, Squarespace Commerce Advanced $660, Shopify Basic $300. Working shown in our 2026 cost comparison.
- Add-on apps counted separately from the plan, because the plan does not include them: Wix Restaurants at $24 a month, and $20 to $200 a month of shipping, review and SEO apps on a store.
- A Shopify theme at $0 if you use one of the free ones Shopify ships, or $150 to $300 one time for a paid theme. Our store figures span both.
- A .com domain at $12 to $25 a year, and email at your own domain at $36 a year where you want it.
- Free static hosting at $0 on the Netlify, Vercel and Cloudflare Pages free tiers, which is what makes the AI route so cheap in cash.
- Freelance work at $2,000 to $5,000 for a small-business marketing site, hosting at $60 to $300 a year, and ad-hoc help at $50 to $150 an hour.
- Agency work at $10,000 to $50,000 for the build plus a $500 to $2,000 a month care retainer, which is how agencies normally sell it.
- Our own prices: $129 a year for a website, or €110 a year billed in euros, with the build free. A Web App with a live booking engine, card payments or stock is quoted per project and then $249 a year. Full source code handover is $599 one time. All on our packages page.
Judgement calls we made, and we are calling them that
These are not published figures. They are our own scaling assumptions, built off the anchors above, and they are the softest part of this page:
- Scaling by page count. The published freelance and agency figures describe a small site. We scale up and down from there for a one-pager and for larger sites.
- Feature uplifts. What a booking engine, an ordering system or a store adds to a freelance or agency quote is our estimate. Real quotes vary enormously with what the thing actually has to do.
- Content budgets. The $0 low end is real: you can write the words and shoot the photos yourself. The high end is roughly what a copywriter and stock photography cost for a site that size.
- Hours. The one published anchor is that a small site takes about 30 to 50 hours to build yourself on Wix or Squarespace. Everything else in the time column is scaled from that, and it is the least precise number here.
- The agency floor and ceiling. We hold agency builds inside the $10,000 to $50,000 band we publish. Genuinely large projects run past the top of it.
What we deliberately did not do
- We did not put a dollar value on your time. We show you the hours instead, because only you know what an hour of yours is worth. That matters most on the AI route, which is the cheapest in cash and the most expensive in hours.
- We did not invent an average. Nobody's website costs the average, so a single number would be a worse answer than a range.
- We did not convert other providers' prices into euros. Everything here is in US dollars at the US list price, except our own euro figure.
- We did not include payment processing fees anywhere. They are a percentage of your sales rather than a website cost, and every path that takes cards pays them.
- We did not pretend to price things we cannot price. Where a path needs a quote or a third-party service we do not sell, its number says and up and the card explains why.
The honest caveats
- Freelance and agency quality varies enormously at the same price. A cost calculator cannot tell you who is good.
- Provider list prices move. These were taken from our cost guides for 2026, so re-check anything you are about to buy.
- Renewal prices are a common trap: cheap shared hosting often doubles or triples after the intro year. Our cost guide covers the hidden line items in detail.
- Sorting cheapest first puts our own $129 line near the top on most answers. That is a consequence of the sort rule, not the point of the page: on cash alone the AI route beats us, and we say so on its card. The full arithmetic on that trade, cash against your own hours, is in DIY vs done for you: the real math.