Ask five builders what a website costs and you will get five numbers that barely share a zip code. One comes from a freelancer in a spare room, another from an agency with a lobby and an account manager. Neither one is lying to you. They are pricing different things and calling both of them a website.
The price is the scope, not magic
Most of a website's price is the price of its scope. How many pages. Whether the words exist yet or someone has to write them. Whether it needs a form that actually delivers, a booking flow, a gallery someone updates, a second language. A one-page site with finished text is a few days of careful work. A ten-page site where the content plan is "we'll figure it out" is a project with a project manager, even if the project manager is unpaid and it turns out to be you.
So when two quotes sit far apart, the useful question is not who is greedy. It is what each quote includes, written down. Get that list and the mystery usually evaporates.
What each tier buys, using my own price list
I can only speak for my own numbers, so here they are. This is the same list that sits on my pricing page, not a friendlier version for the article.
- Landing page, $600-900. One well-made page: who you are, what you do, how to reach you. For a business that lives on referrals and mostly needs to look real when someone searches the name.
- Small site, $1,500-2,500. Roughly three to five pages. Home, services, about, contact. Enough room to explain what you actually do differently, which one page rarely allows.
- Standard site, $2,500-4,500. More pages, and more of the work that takes real hours: structuring content, laying out services properly, making photography decisions instead of avoiding them. This is the tier most established small businesses actually need.
- Large build, $5,000-9,000. Custom interactive work, bigger content loads, more moving parts. ELEVE, an amenities company in New York, was a build in this tier. It earned the tier by its scope, not its address.
Around those sit the smaller numbers. Extra pages run $150-350 each depending on what goes on them. Care plans, for people who want updates handled, are $50 a month for the basics, $100-150 for regular changes, and $250 and up when the site is genuinely busy. None of that is mandatory. A finished site with nothing changing sits there just fine.
The costs nobody puts in the quote
A few costs live outside every quote, mine included.
- Your time on content. The biggest one. Someone has to decide what the services are called, what the prices are, which five sentences describe the business. If your builder writes it for you, you pay in money. If you write it, you pay in evenings. Either way it gets paid.
- Photos. Stock photography reads as stock from across the room. Real photos of your actual work cost either a photographer's fee or an afternoon with decent light.
- The domain. Around $10 a year. Registered in your name, not your builder's. This one is small but non-negotiable.
- Hosting. Here it is $0 a month, because I build small static sites and put them on Cloudflare's free tier. My own site is 357 KB fully loaded, 21 requests, zero third-party scripts, measured September 1, 2026. That is why the hosting can be free. If you are on a website builder instead, check your own bill; most builder subscriptions land somewhere between a streaming service and a car payment, and they quietly renew forever.
What makes the price move mid-project
Websites rarely go over budget because of the original work. They go over because the project changes shape after it starts. Two pages become five. A "small tweak" turns out to be a booking system. Content arrives late and different from what was planned, so layouts get rebuilt around it.
The fix is boring: a written scope before any money moves. Pages listed by name. Features listed by name. What counts as a revision and what counts as new work. On my side the deal is simple. I keep revising until it matches what we agreed on paper, at no extra cost. Changes beyond the paper are fine too, they just get named and priced before they happen, an extra page at $150-350 instead of a mysteriously larger invoice at the end. The revision policy is spelled out on the FAQ if you want the fine print.
When not to spend the money
Some rebuilds should not happen, and it is cheaper to hear that now.
If the phone rings, the site loads properly on a phone, and the hours and prices on it are correct, "it looks a bit dated" is a weak reason to spend four figures this year. If the real problem is that nobody finds you, a redesign alone will not fix that, and anyone who promises it will is selling something else. If the business is about to pivot, wait until it lands. And if the project is young and unproven, buy the smallest thing that makes it look real, a landing page, not a large build. A young project that has not proven itself yet says so, and there is no shame in a website that says the same.
If you are not sure which side of that line your site is on, run it through the free audit. It reads your actual pages and tells you plainly what it finds. It costs $0 to ask.