What a small business website costs per month.

The short answer: what it costs per month

A small-business website in 2026 runs between $10 and $350 a month, and the spread has little to do with quality — it depends on who does the work. A builder you fill in yourself costs $10–30 a month plus your own time. A template put together by a freelancer is $500–2,000 upfront plus $10–40 a month for hosting, plus a fee for every change afterwards. An agency charges $3,000–15,000 upfront and $100–300 a month for care. A done-for-you subscription site is $60–150 a month with nothing upfront. The only honest comparison is total cost of ownership over three years, because three years is roughly how long it takes for a site to age enough to need rebuilding.

• DIY builder (Wix, Squarespace, Tilda): $10–30 a month, and you do all the work.
• Freelancer on a template: $500–2,000 upfront, $10–40 a month hosting, changes billed separately.
• Agency: $3,000–15,000 upfront, $100–300 a month for support.
• Done-for-you subscription: $60–150 a month, nothing upfront.

The costs almost everyone forgets

The launch price is the most visible part of the bill and nowhere near the largest. Over three years everything else piles on: the domain and certificate, hosting, plugin and theme licences, the updates that periodically break something, and changes. Changes are the big hidden line: with an hourly contractor, something as small as a new phone number or an added service starts at $50, so the owner begins saving them up “for later”. A year on, “later” has become a site where half the information is wrong; a year after that, it has become a conversation about a paid redesign.

• Domain and SSL: $15–60 a year, and the site stops loading if you forget them.
• Plugins and themes: $100–500 a year on an average WordPress site.
• Changes: from $50 a time — or postponed until nothing on the site is true any more.
• Redesign: every 4–5 years, priced like a new site, and it usually costs you search rankings.
• Getting hacked: for a site with no security updates this is a question of when, not whether.

Total cost over three years

Take the same site — an eight-to-ten-page service site with an enquiry form and a price list — and add up everything that leaves the till over three years. Do it yourself in a builder: about $700 in money and 60–100 hours of your own time, which nobody counts even though it is the most expensive part. Freelancer: $1,200 to build, $900 in hosting and domain, $1,500 of accumulated changes — around $3,600. Agency: $6,000 for the site and $5,400 of retainer — around $11,400. A $60-a-month subscription: $2,160 and nothing on top. The gap between the options is not about the quality of the markup. It is about who pays to keep the site alive.

• Builder: ~$700 plus 60–100 hours of your own time.
• Freelancer: ~$3,600, of which $1,500 is changes that were never in the quote.
• Agency: ~$11,400.
• Subscription at $60/mo: $2,160, with changes and hosting inside it.

When a builder really is the right answer

Not every business needs a site made by people. If you are still testing an idea, if you need a single-page card that will never change, if you enjoy tinkering and have the hours for it — a builder is cheaper and more honest than any service. It is also the right call when the business genuinely lives on social media or a marketplace and the website exists only as a link in a profile. A service starts winning at the point where the site becomes a working tool: when enquiries come through it, when the information changes every month, and when an hour of your time is worth more than an hour of someone else’s.

Why this got cheaper than it was two years ago

The price of development has always been the price of hours. Layout, copy, sourcing and processing images, setup, testing — all of it used to need a team and was billed at an hourly rate. Today a large part of that work is done by one person with AI, and it takes several times fewer hours. Hence the price: charging for hours that no longer exist would be dishonest. The side effect matters more than the discount itself — the service is now within reach of businesses it never was: workshops, coffee shops, private practitioners, small contractors, for whom a $5,000 website was simply never on the table.

Where a subscription stops being enough

The base subscription is enough for a small or mid-sized business — one whose site explains what the company does and collects enquiries. A large company will need more than that, and it is better said plainly than discovered later. At that scale things appear which do not fit inside a flat monthly fee: paid advertising with a budget and someone managing it, continuous content production, integrations with internal systems, an in-house marketing team that needs its own access and its own processes. Those are separate jobs on a separate invoice. The right way to read the price is this: $60–150 a month is what it costs to keep a site alive and working. It is not the cost of a company’s entire marketing.

What is actually worth comparing

Price is the worst single criterion for choosing who builds your site, because it is the one thing an underquoted estimate can fake. Five questions are more useful, and the answers will shape the next three years: what does a change cost and how fast does it happen; who owns the domain; can you take the site with you and for how much; what happens if the contractor disappears; and do you see the result before you pay. Someone who answers all five with specific numbers is almost always the better choice over someone who is a quarter cheaper.

• Price and turnaround of one change. “We’ll discuss it” is a bad answer.
• The domain in your name. If it sits with the contractor, you cannot leave.
• The buy-out price of the site. Named upfront, not “we’ll work something out”.
• A plan for the contractor disappearing. Backups, credentials, who takes over.
• The result before payment. A finished page, not a picture in a slide deck.