Guides
How much does a website really cost?
August 30, 2026 · BytePresence
Budget ranges for DIY tools, freelancers, and studios — plus when to hire, where to look, and what actually moves the price.
Photo: Kelly Sikkema, via Unsplash
“How much does a website cost?” is the wrong first question if nobody has written down what the site has to do. A five-page brochure, a product site with CMS, and a web app with login and payments are three different jobs. The number follows the scope.
Rough budget ranges
- DIY builders (Squarespace, Wix, Webflow templates): often $200–$800/year plus your time. Fine for a simple presence when you can maintain it.
- Freelancers: roughly $1,500–$8,000 for a small business site — wide range depending on country, experience, and whether design and copy are included.
- Studios and agencies: roughly $5,000–$25,000+ for a custom marketing or product site with proper engineering, SEO baseline, and handover.
- Web applications (accounts, dashboards, integrations): often $15,000–$80,000+ because you are buying software, not pages.
Our studio plans start at $5,999 for a production website — not a template with your logo swapped in. Enterprise and application work is scoped separately because the stack and maintenance story are different.
Should you hire someone or do it yourself?
DIY makes sense when the site is mostly static, you have time to learn the tool, and you do not need custom integrations or strong performance under traffic. Hire when the site is part of revenue — bookings, leads, checkout, SEO you can measure — or when you would rather pay once for a maintainable codebase than rebuild in two years.
Where to find someone to build it
- Referrals from businesses your size — still the highest signal.
- Studios whose live work matches your industry (check /work or case studies, not only homepage hero shots).
- Vetted marketplaces when you need speed — read reviews, insist on code ownership and post-launch support in writing.
- Avoid choosing on the lowest bid alone. The cheap quote often skips metadata, sitemap, analytics, performance, and documentation.
If you are comparing quotes, ask each vendor the same scope: number of templates, CMS or not, forms, SEO deliverables, analytics, who hosts, who fixes bugs after launch, and who owns the domain and repository. The answers matter more than the headline price.