Small business website cost calculator

1. Enter how many pages a customer would actually open on your site — for most local businesses this is one to five.
2. Enter how many changes you expect to make in a typical month, being honest rather than optimistic.
3. Enter what an hour of your time is worth: not your wage, but what you would earn doing billable work instead.
4. Choose a horizon. One-off build fees look cheap over one year and expensive over five, so try both.
5. Pick your market, which scales freelancer and agency labour but leaves software and domain prices alone.
6. Read the true-total column, then open the assumptions to see every rate the arithmetic used.

The single most useful thing you can do here is change your hourly value and watch the winning row move. The crossover point is the decision — everything either side of it is just arithmetic.

Search for what a small business website costs and you will be given a range so wide it is useless: free to fifty thousand dollars. That range is not evasion. It is a genuine reflection of the fact that four different things are all called "a website", and they have almost nothing in common beyond the word.

A one-page site you build yourself on a free tier, with your own photos and your own copy, costs the price of a domain. A five-page site with professional photography, a booking system, and a copywriter who interviews your customers costs several thousand. Both are correct answers to the same question. The reason people feel misled is that the person quoting rarely says which one they mean.

The better question, and the one this calculator answers, is: what does the version of a website that fits my business cost me, all in, over the period I plan to keep it? All in means cash plus your time. Over a period means one-off build fees get spread properly rather than compared against monthly subscriptions as if they were the same shape of number.

Every price guide on the internet compares cash. A free builder costs nothing; a builder subscription costs a few dollars a month; a freelancer costs a couple of thousand. On that basis, the free route always wins, and owners choose it, and a meaningful proportion of them still do not have a live website eight months later.

The reason is that the free route is not free. It costs somewhere between fifteen and fifty hours of your evenings, depending on how many pages you need and how much you fight the editor. Those hours are real. They come out of billable work, or out of your family, and pretending they cost zero is how a plumber ends up spending three weekends on a website instead of doing three weekends of call-outs.

So the calculator asks you to price them. Not at your wage — at what you would actually earn in that hour doing the work you are good at. For a tradesperson billing at eighty dollars an hour, thirty hours of website building is a two-thousand-four-hundred-dollar decision that appeared nowhere on the price comparison.

This is not an argument for hiring an agency. It is an argument for seeing the whole bill. Plenty of owners look at both columns and still choose to do it themselves, because they want the control, or because the work is genuinely slack that month, or because they enjoy it. That is a fine decision. It is just a different decision from the one you make when the second column is invisible.

• Page count. The first page carries the design; each additional page mostly carries content. That is why a freelancer's second page costs a fraction of their first, and why five pages is nowhere near five times the price of one.
• Who writes the words. Copy is the most commonly under-scoped part of a website build. If you supply it, the build is cheaper and slower to start. If they write it, add meaningfully to the quote and expect an interview.
• Photography. Stock photos are free and read as stock photos. A half-day shoot of your actual work, your actual van, your actual premises, is one of the highest-return few hundred dollars in this whole exercise, and it sits outside every quote here.
• Functionality beyond a brochure. Online booking, payments, a store, a member area. Each one adds build cost and, more importantly, ongoing cost — because things that take money have to be maintained, tested and supported.
• How often it changes. A site nobody touches is cheap to own. A site with seasonal prices, a changing menu, or new services every quarter has a running cost that dwarfs its build cost over five years — either in your hours or in per-change fees.

Notice that only two of those five are about the website itself. The other three are about the content that goes in it, which is why owners who arrive with their words, their photos and a clear list of services get quoted less than owners who arrive with a vague idea and a logo.

A builder subscription at sixteen dollars a month and a freelancer build at eighteen hundred dollars feel like completely different kinds of expense, and the human brain is bad at comparing them. Sixteen dollars sounds like nothing. Eighteen hundred sounds like a serious decision.

Over five years, sixteen dollars a month is nine hundred and sixty dollars, and that is before the maintenance retainer, the domain and the email. The freelancer's eighteen hundred is a one-off, but it comes with its own ongoing costs, and it buys you a site you do not have to build.

There is no universal winner here, which is exactly why the horizon selector exists. Change it from one year to five and watch the ordering shift. Short horizons favour subscriptions; long horizons favour one-off builds — provided the one-off build does not need replacing, which is the assumption doing the most work in that sentence.

The practical rule most owners land on: if you expect this website to be recognisably the same website in five years, weight the one-off build. If your business is still finding its shape, or you might pivot what you sell, weight the low-commitment monthly option and revisit.

Free website tiers are not a trick. They exist because the provider expects a percentage of free users to eventually need a custom domain, or a store, or more pages, and the free tier is the cheapest customer acquisition they will ever buy. That is a fair trade and it is stated openly by most of the industry.

What you give up varies. Almost always: the provider's branding somewhere on the page, and an address like yourbusiness.provider.com rather than yourbusiness.com. Often: limits on pages, on storage, or on the forms you can add. Sometimes: no access to the site's analytics, or an inability to connect it to a Google Business Profile in the way you would like.

For a huge number of local businesses, none of that matters much in year one. A plumber whose customers find them through the map pack and call from their phone loses very little by having a subdomain. A wedding photographer whose whole proposition is taste loses more.

The honest test is whether the compromise touches the thing you are selling. If your business sells trust and permanence — legal, financial, medical — a subdomain undermines the pitch and the fourteen dollars a year for a domain is the best money in this entire calculator. If your business sells availability and price, the subdomain costs you almost nothing.

The most common reason a website quote goes up is that the brief was incomplete, and the most common missing piece is content. If you cannot say how many pages you need and roughly what goes on each, you will be quoted a range, and the range will resolve upward.

Before you ask anyone for a price, write down four things: the list of pages, who is writing the words for each, who is supplying the photos, and what the site must be able to do beyond displaying information. That takes an hour and it is the highest-leverage hour in the whole project.

Then ask for the price of the second year, not just the first. A build fee with an unstated hosting and maintenance arrangement is half a quote. Reputable suppliers answer this instantly; the ones who go quiet are telling you something.

Finally, ask what happens if you want to leave. Who owns the domain, who owns the content, and can the site be exported. This costs nothing to ask at the start and is close to impossible to resolve at the end.