Somebody on ContractorTalk asked what a website should cost. The answers in that thread, for the same basic thing, went like this:
"$3-5K for the first year and a maintenance contract of about $500 - 1k."
"Small business web sites are usually in the $3k to $6k+ with proven web providers."
And then somebody else mentioned getting a basic site for a few hundred dollars, and said they look rough but nearly everyone uses them.
So the honest answer to "what does a website cost" is: anywhere from $350 to $35,000, and that spread is exactly why the question feels like a trap. You're not being told a price. You're being asked how much you'll pay.
Let me lay out what's actually in there.
You're paying for four separate things
Most of the confusion comes from mashing these together on one invoice.
- The build. One time. Somebody makes the pages, writes the words, sets up the forms.
- The domain and hosting. Small and forever. Call it $20 to $50 a month for a normal small business site, often less. This is the boring one and it's almost never the problem.
- Upkeep. Updates, backups, the thing that breaks at 11pm, changing your hours when you stop doing Saturdays. Sometimes bundled, sometimes hourly, sometimes ignored until it becomes an emergency.
- Marketing. Getting people to the site. SEO, ads, posts, profile work. This is the recurring number that people mistake for the website's price, and it's usually the biggest one.
When a guy tells you he pays $1,200 a month for his website, he's almost always talking about number four. The website part of that might be forty bucks.
What each band actually gets you
Rough, but it's the shape of the market.
Under $500. A template with your name on it. Usually a builder, sometimes a guy on a marketplace site. It'll be online, it'll look like a hundred other sites, and it'll probably work. You're doing your own words and your own photos. For a one truck operation that just needs to exist and take a form, this is not a crime. It's a starting point.
$1,000 to $3,000. Someone real did it. Custom-ish layout, your photos, pages for your actual services, a form that goes somewhere you check. Most trades sit here and should. The variable isn't the code, it's whether the person writing the words understands what your customer is scared of.
$3,000 to $6,000. The band those forum guys quoted. More pages, city pages, real copywriting, someone thinking about what happens after the click. Worth it if you're in a competitive metro or you've got more than a couple crews.
Above $10,000. Now you're paying for a project team. Design rounds, integrations, a booking system that talks to your scheduling software. Some businesses genuinely need this. A four man crew doing residential service does not.
The part nobody says: a $6,000 site and a $1,500 site look about the same to a homeowner on a phone in a driveway. The difference shows up in whether it gets found and whether it turns a visitor into a call, and those are mostly not build-cost problems.
The number that actually matters
The build price is the number everybody negotiates. The monthly is the number that decides whether this was a good idea.
Five hundred a month is six grand a year. Every year. That's a bigger decision than a one time three grand build, and it's the one people sign without reading, because it's smaller per line.
So when you get a quote, split it yourself. What's one time. What's every month. What happens to the monthly if you stop. Write those three answers down before you talk about design.
And ask what the monthly covers, specifically. "Maintenance and SEO" isn't an answer. Hours of work, or a list of tasks, or a report with numbers on it. If nobody can describe it, you're buying a subscription to a feeling.
Cheap has a real cost, and it isn't the site
The cheap end isn't a scam. It's just usually incomplete in one specific way: nobody set up the part that gets you found, and nobody's minding it after launch.
A $350 site with no Google profile work, no service pages, and a contact form that goes to an inbox nobody watches, is a business card that costs $350. Which is fine, if that's what you meant to buy. It's a disaster if you thought you were buying a phone that rings.
The expensive end has its own version of this, where you pay $8,000 and then nobody touches it for three years and your hours are wrong on it all winter.
There's also a cost that never shows up on the quote: your time. Somebody has to hand over photos, tell the writer what you actually do, and check the pages before they go live. That's a few hours of yours no matter who you hire. The builds that go badly are almost always the ones where the contractor was too busy to answer, so the agency guessed, and now the site says things about your business that aren't true.
Budget three hours of your own time on any build. If the quote assumes zero, somebody's about to invent your business for you.
Whatever you spend, somebody has to own the thing after launch. Usually that ends up being you. Know that going in. And whatever you sign, make sure the domain and the files are in your name, because the price stops mattering the day you want to leave and can't.
What I charge, since it'd be weak not to say
Mine starts at $149 a month, with a setup fee, and it goes up from there depending on how many towns you want to show up in and how much work goes into it every month. The middle tier is $749 a month and covers two cities plus eight posts a month. There's a top one at $2,499 for people competing in a whole metro.
It's all written on the pricing page with the setup numbers, so you can compare it to whatever else you've been quoted without calling me and getting talked at.
I'm not the cheapest and I'm nowhere near the most expensive. If you want the cheapest, the builder route is real and I wrote the honest breakdown of doing it yourself, including where it falls apart.
Three questions before you sign anything
Ask what's one time and what's monthly, and get both numbers separately.
Ask what happens to the site if you stop paying. "It goes away" and "you keep it" are wildly different products at the same price.
Ask who owns the domain. If the answer takes more than four words, you have your answer.
That's the whole defense. Three questions, before money moves, while everybody's still being friendly.
The answers don't have to be the ones you wanted. Plenty of good shops keep the site on their own platform and tell you so up front, and that can still be a fine deal if the price reflects it. What you're testing is whether they'll say it plainly. A vague answer to a simple money question is the only red flag you need at this stage.
Get all three in an email. Not because you're planning to sue anybody, but because in fourteen months you won't remember what was said on a phone call, and neither will they.
If you've got a quote in front of you and you can't tell whether it's fair, send it to me. I'll tell you what's normal about it and what isn't, and if it's a decent deal I'll say that too, because talking somebody out of a fair price isn't worth the ten minutes.