What a website should actually cost
If you ask five people to build you the same website, you’ll get quotes between $500 and $50,000. That’s not because four of them are lying. It’s because “a website” describes about six different products.
What you’re actually paying for
Almost all of the cost sits in three places, and none of them is the visual design:
- Deciding what the site needs to do. The hardest part of most projects isn’t building the pages, it’s working out which pages should exist and what each one is for. A cheap quote usually means this step was skipped, and you’ll pay for it later in revisions.
- Whether anything is custom. A brochure site with five pages and a contact form is a solved problem. A booking system, a customer portal, or anything that talks to software you already use is not.
- What happens after launch. A site nobody maintains starts breaking in about eighteen months — dependencies age out, SSL certificates lapse, and the contact form quietly stops delivering. Whether that’s your problem or your developer’s changes the price a lot.
The honest ranges
Under $1,000 buys a small, well-built brochure site if the scope is genuinely small and you already know what you want to say. It does not buy custom functionality, so if a quote at this price includes some, ask what’s actually being built and who looks after it afterwards.
$2,000 – $10,000 is where most small business sites land once there’s real content, real structure, and someone thinking about how visitors convert.
Above that, you’re paying for custom software that happens to live in a browser. That’s a different conversation, and it should come with a discovery phase before anyone quotes you a number.
The question worth asking
Don’t ask what a website costs. Ask what it’s supposed to earn, or save, or replace. A site that books twelve appointments a month justifies a very different budget than one that exists so people can find your phone number — and that’s worth settling before you start comparing quotes.