Ask five people what a website costs and you will get answers from “free” to “fifteen thousand.” All of them are right about something. The price depends on who builds it, who keeps it running, and what gets left out of the quote. Here is the landscape as we see it for a local service business with one location and a few trucks.
Four ways to get a site
Do it yourself. Builders like Wix, Squarespace and GoDaddy charge about $15 to $50 a month for a business plan. The real cost is your time. Plan on several evenings to get a first version up, and know that most DIY sites never get finished. You pick the template, write the words, find the photos and make the updates. If you enjoy that, it is the cheapest route in cash. Most owners we meet started one and stopped at page two.
A freelancer. $1,500 to $5,000 is typical for a small site. Quality ranges from excellent to alarming, and the biggest risk is not the build but what happens after. Many freelancers host the site on their own account, and when they take a full-time job or stop answering, the site goes with them. Ask who hosts it and who holds the domain before you pay a deposit.
An agency. $5,000 and up, and $10,000 or more is common. You get strategy meetings, a project manager and a custom design. That makes sense for a company with 20 locations. For a three-truck plumbing company it usually buys meetings you did not need.
FullRoute. $997 to build and $99 a month for hosting and care. That is our price, stated plainly. It includes up to five pages written for you, a free preview before you pay anything, two rounds of changes, launch in about two weeks, and hosting, security and up to 30 minutes of edits each month. The care plan has a three-month minimum, then it is month to month. You own your domain and your content. Year one comes to $2,185. Each year after is $1,188.
We are not the cheapest option. DIY costs less in cash. We are priced for an owner who wants it done well and then wants to stop thinking about it.
What is usually hidden
A quote is rarely the total. Ask about each of these:
- Domain. Your yourbusiness.com name, typically $10 to $20 a year. Make sure it is registered in your name, not the designer’s.
- Hosting. Where the site lives. Often billed separately, monthly or yearly, after the build is done.
- SSL. The padlock in the browser. It should be free in 2026. If someone charges for it, ask why.
- Edits. New prices, new hours, a new photo. Many designers bill these by the hour after launch, and a $40 change can take a week.
- “Maintenance plans.” Sometimes real value, sometimes a monthly fee for software updates you never see. Ask exactly what you get each month.
- Extras. Stock photos, premium templates, plugins, business email and “SEO packages” that add up fast and are rarely in the first number you hear.
A made-up example
Maddox Electric in Roswell, which does not exist, gets three quotes. A freelancer offers $2,800, hosted on his own server, edits billed hourly. An agency offers $7,500 plus $250 a month for maintenance. The owner also prices a $29 a month builder plan and figures he could do it himself on weekends.
Each is a reasonable choice for someone. The freelancer is a good bet if he is still around in three years. The agency is a good bet if Maddox grows into four locations. The builder is a good bet if the owner actually finishes it. The question is not which is cheapest. It is which one you will still be happy with in year two, and what the year-two bill looks like.
How to judge any price
Think in jobs, not dollars. If an average job is worth $400 to you, a $2,185 first year needs about six jobs to pay for itself. A $7,500 build needs about nineteen. That is not a prediction of what a site will bring in. Nobody honest can promise that. It is the math to run on every quote, so the number means something to your business instead of sounding big or small on its own.
Questions to ask any web designer
- Is the domain registered in my name, and will I have the login?
- What happens to the site if I stop paying you?
- Are hosting and SSL included, and what do they cost in year two?
- How much are changes after launch, and how fast do they happen?
- Can I see something before I pay?
- How many pages and how many rounds of changes are included?
- Will it have a tap-to-call button and a quote form that reaches my phone?
- Can you show me three sites you built that are still live today?
Ask us the same eight. Our answers are yes, you keep everything and we hand it over, yes and $99 a month, included up to 30 minutes a month and usually within a few days, yes before you pay a dollar, five pages and two rounds, yes, and ask us and we will show you what is live right now.
The easiest way to check the fifth answer is to take us up on it. We will build a free preview of your home page with your real Google reviews and text you the link, with no cost and no commitment. Get my free preview. For what those five pages should contain, read What to put on a service business website, page by page.