A custom website for a local business starts around $3,500 and most land between there and about $12,000. Three things move the number: how many genuinely different pages there are, who writes the content, and whether anything has to talk to another system. Template swaps and design taste barely move it at all.
That surprises people. The visual design is the part everyone talks about in the first meeting and it is rarely the expensive part. The expensive part is the twelve service pages that each need their own real explanation, or the fact that nobody at the business has time to write about what they do, or the booking system that has to hand appointments to the software the front desk already uses.
What am I actually paying for?
Roughly four things, in descending order of cost on most projects: content, structure, design and build, and the connections to everything else. Content usually surprises people the most, because if you cannot supply it, someone has to interview you and write it, and that is real hours.
| Line | Typical share | What moves it |
|---|---|---|
| Content and writing | Often the largest | Whether you supply copy or we interview and write it |
| Structure and planning | Modest | How many genuinely different services there are |
| Design and build | Steady | Page count far more than visual taste |
| Integrations | Zero or a lot | Booking, payments, intake forms, inventory |
| Migration | Zero or a lot | How much old content has to move with its URLs intact |
The floor of $3,500 buys a small, well built, properly written site: home, about, contact and a handful of service pages, with real copy rather than filler. It does not buy twenty pages, original photography, or a system that syncs with anything.
What pushes the number up?
Page count is the obvious one, but only when the pages are genuinely different. Five service pages that each describe a different job are five pages of work. Five town pages that say the same thing with the town name swapped are one page of work and a bad idea besides.
Content is the quiet one. If we write it, we interview you, draft it, and go back and forth until it sounds like you rather than like us. That is usually the single largest line on a project of any size, and it is also the line most worth paying for, because a beautiful site with hollow writing converts badly.
Then integrations. A booking calendar, a payment step, an inventory feed, a patient intake form that has to satisfy a specific compliance rule. Each of those is a project inside the project. And migrations: moving four hundred old blog posts with their URLs intact is genuinely fiddly work, and it belongs on the quote as its own line rather than hidden in the build.
Want a real number instead of a range?
Send us the list of services you sell and say who will write the content. That is most of the estimate, and we will come back with a figure and what sits inside it.
Get a free website and marketing auditWhat is usually excluded, and how does that become a fight?
Photography. Almost every uncomfortable conversation we have had about scope started with photography. If the quote does not say who is supplying photographs, assume the answer is you, and assume the site will look like whatever you can find.
The other common exclusions are extra revision rounds, copy for pages added after the plan was agreed, email setup, and the domain and hosting themselves. None of those are unreasonable to exclude. All of them are unreasonable to leave unsaid.
What about the ongoing cost?
The site itself needs hosting, a domain and updates. A domain runs about $15 to $25 a year at a normal registrar. Hosting for a small business site is modest. Updates are the part people forget, and neglect there is how a site ends up broken or compromised two years after launch.
Beyond keeping it alive, there is the question of whether anyone is doing anything with it. Our managed plans start at $499 a month and cover the ongoing work: content, local search, reviews and the reporting that tells you whether any of it is landing. Some businesses do not need that at all in year one. A business in a competitive category almost always does.
Is a cheaper option ever the right call?
Yes, and we say so more often than you might expect. If you are pre revenue, if you are testing whether a service has a market at all, or if your entire business genuinely runs through one platform already, a simple templated site you build yourself is a reasonable place to start.
What we would push back on is treating that as permanent. Google turned off the free websites it used to generate from Business Profiles in March 2024 and a lot of small businesses discovered on that day that their only web presence was something they did not own. Owning the domain and the files matters more than the build quality does.
The one we underquoted
We quoted a fifteen page site for a professional services firm and did not ask enough about the content. They had no existing copy worth keeping and nobody internally who could write. What we scoped as an edit turned into writing fifteen pages from interviews, and we ate a meaningful part of that because the gap was ours to catch. Now the first question on every quote is who is writing the words, and the answer changes the number before anyone signs anything.
If you want a real number for your own situation rather than a range, the fastest route is to tell us the services you sell and who writes the content. That is genuinely most of the estimate. The published floors and what sits inside them are on our pricing page, the approach is on the Growth Engine page, and if you would rather just talk it through, get in touch.