A small business website costs $5,000 to $15,000 from an agency, $1,500 to $8,000 from a freelancer, or a few hundred a year DIY. Full 2026 cost breakdown.
Updated
A small business website costs $5,000 to $15,000 when an agency builds it, $1,500 to $8,000 from a freelancer, and $200 to $600 a year if you build it yourself on Wix or Squarespace. Ongoing costs add $30 to $50 a month for hosting and $100 or more a month for maintenance. That is the short answer. The rest of this article is the math behind it.
I run Make Waves Marketing. We have built more than 100 websites for businesses in South Louisiana and Northeast Florida, and every price on this page is either what we charge or what I have watched clients pay somebody else before they came to us. No ranges pulled from a survey of surveys.
Your website is also the employee who never calls in sick, never takes lunch, and never asks for a raise. It has the worst attitude on staff if you built it in 2017 and have not spoken to it since. Ours was that employee for a while too, which is like a dentist with a toothache, so take everything below with the understanding that I have made most of these mistakes personally.
Most professionally built small business websites cost $3,000 to $15,000. Do-it-yourself builders run $0 to $50 a month. Freelancers charge $1,500 to $8,000 per project. Agencies start around $5,000 and run past $35,000 for stores and custom software. The method you pick sets the price more than anything else about your business.
The DIY timeline says "a weekend, in theory." I have never met a business owner who finished in a weekend. Most spend 40 to 80 hours, decide their time is worth more than that, and call somebody in month three. If you value your time at even $75 an hour, 60 hours is $4,500 you spent to avoid a $5,000 quote.
The large agency row is not us. We are an in-house team of about ten in Thibodaux and Jacksonville. We quote flat and we do not have a project manager whose job is to keep five people from emailing you separately. That is most of why our range starts where a big agency's ends.
Every website price is a bundle of the same six parts: domain, hosting, security, design and build, content, and functionality. Design and build is the biggest line. Content is the one everybody forgets.
At Make Waves Marketing the design, build, copywriting, and structured data are inside the flat quote. Photography and video are scoped separately because a two-truck plumbing company and a wedding venue need very different amounts of it.
Agencies charge one of two ways. Hourly, where you find out the price when the invoice shows up, or flat, where you know it before the first meeting ends. Most small business websites we build cost $5,000 to $15,000, quoted flat in writing before we start. The number moves with page count, whether the copy exists or needs to be written, how much photo and video the site needs, and whether there is a store, a client portal, or software tied in.