The short answer
For a local business with a handful of pages and no online shop, a fair one-off price sits in the high hundreds to low thousands, or roughly $50–$100 a month on a plan that includes the hosting and the changes.
Under a few hundred dollars you are almost always buying a template with your logo dropped into it. Over about $5,000 you are paying for a team — which is a real thing to buy, and the wrong thing to buy for a plumbing company.
The number that matters isn't the quote. It's the quote plus five years.
A $500 site on a plan that charges $79/month costs $5,240 by year five. A $2,000 site with $10/month hosting costs $2,600. Ask for both numbers before you compare anything.
What each quote is actually buying
Website quotes vary wildly because they are not quotes for the same object. These are the four things usually being sold, roughly what they go for, and who each one is right for.
| What you're buying | Usual price | Right for |
|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself | $16–$40/mo | You have time and patience. The tool is fine; the twenty hours are the cost, and the result looks like the template because it is one. |
| Template fill-in | $300–$800 once | Almost nobody, honestly. You pay someone to do the twenty hours, and still end up with a page that looks like four other businesses in your town. |
| One person building it properly | $650–$3,000 once, or $50–$100/mo | Most local businesses. A real design for your trade, built by the person you actually talk to. |
| An agency | $5,000–$25,000+ | You need a team: multiple stakeholders, integrations, a brand system, ongoing campaigns. Genuinely worth it at that size, and a waste below it. |
| What I charge | $650 once, or $65/mo | Named here so you can put it against the rest rather than take my word for where it sits. The full price list. |
The ongoing costs, honestly
This is where most of the money quietly goes, and where most of the padding lives. The real numbers:
- Domain: $12–$20 a year. That's it. If you're being billed $50 a year for a domain, you're paying somebody's markup.
- Hosting: $0–$10 a month for a small business site. Sites like this one run on infrastructure that costs almost nothing at this size. A $40/month hosting line for a five-page site is a margin, not a cost.
- SSL certificate: free. Has been for years. Anyone charging you for HTTPS is charging you for something they got for nothing.
- Email: $6–$7 per person per month if you want your address at your own domain, which you should. That one is a real cost and worth paying.
- Changes: varies wildly. Some people charge by the hour, some include it. This is the line that separates a $65/month plan from a $65/month plan that also bills you $95 to change your opening hours.
Add it up and the honest floor for running a small business website is somewhere around $10–$20 a month plus whatever you're paying for a person's time. Anything above that is buying time, not servers.
What's worth paying for
Not everything expensive is padding. These are the lines that earn their money for a local business:
- Speed. A site that takes four seconds to load on a phone loses a chunk of the people who asked for it. This is the single most under-valued line in any quote.
- Your Google Business Profile set up properly. For a local trade this often does more than the website itself. It should be part of the build, not a separate monthly product.
- Real photographs. Photos of your actual work, your actual van, your actual room. Stock photography is the fastest way to look like everybody else. A few hundred dollars here beats a few thousand on design.
- Somebody who answers. The value isn't the launch, it's month fourteen when your hours change and you need it fixed today. Ask how that works before you sign anything.
- A form that actually delivers. Sounds absurd. It is also the most common broken thing on small business websites, and nobody finds out until they wonder why the phone stopped ringing.
What isn't
- Page count as a price driver. The tenth page costs a fraction of the first. A quote that scales linearly with pages is priced on your perception, not the work.
- "Custom CMS" for a five-page site. You need to change your hours and your prices. That is not a content management problem.
- An SEO retainer starting month one. Before you have a fast site with correct local details, there is nothing for a retainer to optimise. It's a subscription to activity.
- Discovery phases and brand workshops, for a business with one owner who already knows what they do.
- Analytics dashboards you'll never open. You want to know whether the phone rang more. Two numbers a month, in an email, is the honest version of this.
The questions that expose a bad deal
You do not need to understand web development to protect yourself. You need four questions, and the answers tell you everything:
- "Whose name is the domain registered in?" If it isn't yours, walk. This is the one that traps people — not the price, the ownership. A domain in the agency's name means leaving costs you your web address, and everything that points at it.
- "What happens to the site if I cancel?" A straight answer is fine either way. A vague one means it disappears and you start over.
- "What does it cost to change something?" Ask specifically about a small change — new hours, a new price. The answer separates a maintained site from a hostage.
- "Can I see something before I pay?" Anybody confident in their work can show you what yours would look like first. If the answer requires a deposit, ask why.
The trap is almost never the price. It's the ownership.
A $65/month site whose domain is in your name is instalments. The same price with the domain in someone else's name is rent — and the rent goes up when you have nowhere to go.
How I price it, and why
For the sake of full disclosure, since this page is on my own website: I charge $650 once or $65 a month, and the trade doesn't change the number. A freight company and a therapy practice paid the same — you can read both builds (heavy haul, behavioral health) and see they share no template.
It's that price because there's one person here. No account manager, no project manager, no office, and no handoffs between four people who each have to be briefed. That's most of what an agency's number pays for, and it's not something a five-page site for a local business needs.
The domain goes in your name on day one. The mock-up of your homepage is free and comes before any money changes hands. If you'd rather take this page's advice and hire somebody else with it, that's a fine outcome too — the four questions above work on anyone, including me.