What a small business website really costs, once you count everything.
Somewhere between $16 a month and $35,000 up front, and the honest answer depends entirely on which of four paths you take. A DIY builder like Squarespace or Wix runs $16 to $99 a month with nothing else to pay for. A self-hosted WordPress site can start under $100 to build but usually settles into $30 to $150 a month once you add up hosting, a theme, and the plugins a real business site needs. A freelancer for a custom build typically runs $2,000 to $8,000 once. An agency runs $10,000 to $35,000 or more. And there is a fifth path most cost articles skip, where the software itself is free and open-source and the only real bill is the cheap server it runs on. None of these is "the" answer. All are real, and I have quoted, built, or maintained sites on every one of these paths.
| Path | Typical build cost | Ongoing cost per year |
|---|---|---|
| DIY on a hosted builder (Squarespace, Wix) | $0 up front | $200 to $1,200 |
| Self-hosted WordPress | Under $100 to start | $360 to $1,800 ($1,200 to $1,800 for a WooCommerce store) |
| Freelancer, custom build | $2,000 to $8,000 | $1,000 to $4,000 if you keep ongoing help |
| Agency, custom build | $10,000 to $35,000 or more | A similar or larger retainer |
| Devani, free and open-source CMS on your own hosting | $0 for the software | About $60 for the cheap server, plus a domain |
None of those numbers is a markup on the same product. They are different products aimed at different situations, and the sticker price hides more than it shows. What follows is what each path actually costs once everything is counted, and where that last row comes from.
Complexity moves it most
A five-page brochure site with a contact form is a different project than one with online booking, a product catalog, staff logins, or a blog someone updates weekly. Ecommerce adds cost at every layer: pricier plans, payment processing, inventory, and more hours to get right.
Who builds it
Build it yourself, hire a freelancer, or hire an agency, and the price moves by an order of magnitude at each step. Mostly you are paying for design judgment and problem-solving time, not just for someone to type HTML.
Build cost versus forever cost
A website has a build cost and then a forever cost. Most of the pricing people quote each other is the build cost. The forever cost is where budgets actually get blown, because almost nobody plans for it up front.
DIY on a hosted builder, the cheapest real option.
This is the one most solo owners and very small businesses actually pick. Squarespace's plans run Basic $16/mo, Core $23, Plus $39, and Advanced $99 on an annual commitment. Wix runs Light $17/mo, Core $29, Business $39, and Business Elite $159, also billed annually for that rate (Wix also has a free plan, but it runs ads, sits on a wixsite.com subdomain, and cannot sell anything, so it is not really an option for a business).
What you get for that monthly fee is genuinely comprehensive: hosting, SSL, templates, a page editor, basic SEO tools, and support, all bundled. No separate hosting bill, no plugin marketplace to shop, no server to think about. For a lot of small businesses that is the whole point, and it is a completely reasonable call. Squarespace's templates in particular are genuinely beautiful, better looking out of the box than most WordPress themes, and that is coming from someone who reaches for WordPress first.
The catch is customization. You are working inside the platform's blocks and layout system, and if your business needs something outside that (a member portal, an unusual booking flow, deep integration with some other tool you already use) you will hit a wall a custom build would not have. The other catch is that the monthly fee is forever. Miss a renewal and the site goes down, full stop. There is no "it still works, just unpatched" state the way there is with a neglected WordPress install.
The monthly fee is forever, and the number you budget around is almost never the number you actually pay for year two.
Self-hosted WordPress, free until you add it all up.
WordPress itself is free, and that is technically true, but it is also the number that gets people in trouble, because it is the number they remember and budget around. The real cost shows up in four places: hosting, a theme, plugins, and either your own time or someone else's.
Hosting alone is a real range. Bare shared hosting starts at $3 to $7 a month, enough to get a small site online but thin on speed and support. Mid-tier managed WordPress hosting runs $13 to $35 a month and includes things like automatic backups and some caching. Fully-managed premium hosting, the kind that actually keeps a business site fast and secure without you babysitting it, runs $30 to $100 a month. A decent premium theme is another $47 to $149 a year. Then the plugins: for a real small-business build, something for forms, SEO, backups, security, and whatever the site needs to do, expect $100 to $500 a year in plugin and extension renewals, and that is before you touch ecommerce.
If the site is actually a store, WooCommerce itself is free to install, but a working store with payment processing, shipping rules, and the extensions a real shop needs commonly lands around $100 to $150 a month all in, once hosting, theme, and extensions are added up. That is not a scare number, it is what a lot of real WooCommerce stores actually cost their owners monthly, and it climbs from there with subscriptions, bookings, or marketing automation extensions layered on.
Then there is the part that does not show up on an invoice: time. WordPress needs its core, theme, and every plugin kept updated, and skipping that is how sites get compromised. That is either your Saturday afternoons or someone else's hourly rate, and freelance WordPress developers charge $50 to $150 an hour for exactly that kind of ongoing work. It is real money even when nobody sends you a bill for it, because it is hours you are not spending on the business. I have seen owners genuinely lose track of how many hours a year they were putting into "just keeping the site running," because it never arrives as one lump number, it arrives as a Tuesday every few weeks.
Hiring it out, and the retainer nobody quotes you.
If you want someone else to design and build the site, the choice is a freelancer or an agency, and they are genuinely different products. What almost nobody budgets for going in: the build price is a one-time cost, and then the site needs somewhere to live and someone to keep it maintained. Hosting is a separate line item from the build quote, often not included at all, and ongoing management runs roughly $95 to $350 a month with a freelancer or $200 to $950 a month with an agency, depending on how hands-on the plan is. A $6,000 build with a $300/mo retainer is a completely normal, legitimate quote. It is also a very different total cost than "$6,000 for a website," which is how it usually gets described out loud.
Freelancer
Real custom work at the lower total cost.
- ✓ $2,000 to $8,000 for a professional site: custom design, a handful of pages, basic SEO, and a CMS you can update yourself afterward.
- ✓ Lower ongoing retainer, roughly $95 to $350 a month if you want continued help.
- × A smaller shop, so less of the strategy, copywriting, and photography direction an agency brings to a bigger project.
Agency
Strategy and scale, at agency prices.
- ✓ Strategy, copywriting, photography direction, and multiple rounds of revision, plus custom development a page builder cannot do.
- ✓ Built for a multi-location business or a complex booking or membership system.
- × $10,000 to $35,000 or more up front, plus a $200 to $950 monthly retainer; a cheap agency that skips the strategy work and still charges agency rates is the worst version of this path.
Both are fair for real work and real judgment, not a markup on a template. The one thing to do before signing either is ask what is actually included, because the gap between a good agency that earns its rate and a cheap one that skips the strategy is exactly what the quote does not spell out.
Hidden and recurring costs almost everyone forgets.
A few things that rarely make it into the first quote, on any path.
- Domain renewal. A .com is $10 to $20 a year at the real rate. Some registrars discount the first year to make the number look smaller, then renew at the real price, so check what year two actually costs before you register anywhere.
- SSL. This used to be a real annual cost. Today it is bundled free on nearly every host and builder via Let's Encrypt, so it is mostly not a line item anymore, though a few budget hosts still upsell a "premium" certificate for $8 to $250 a year that does functionally the same thing as the free one. If a host is charging you for SSL in 2026, ask why.
- The promo-to-renewal jump. This is the one that catches people. WordPress.com's own published pricing is a clean example: Personal starts at $4/mo but renews at $10, Premium $8 renews at $18, Business $25 renews at $45, Commerce $45 renews at $75. That is a 2x to 2.5x jump, every tier, and it is not unique to WordPress.com. Budget for the renewal price, not the sign-up price.
- Transaction fees on a store. If you are selling anything, check whether the platform adds its own fee on top of card processing. Shopify is the clearest example: its Basic plan adds 2% on top of standard card fees if you do not use Shopify Payments, dropping to 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced. On a store doing meaningful volume, that is real money leaving every sale.
- Maintenance, whether or not you pay for it. Even a "free" DIY WordPress site has a labor cost in updates and troubleshooting. Even a hosted builder site has a labor cost in someone occasionally updating copy, checking forms still deliver, and refreshing photos. Budgeting $0 for maintenance because nobody is invoicing you for it is how sites quietly rot.
- Content and email, which are not free either. Every quote above assumes you are supplying the words and photos, or paying separately for them. A copywriter and a real photo shoot can add anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand, and stock photography, while cheaper, tends to look like stock photography. Professional email on your own domain is usually another small monthly add-on, $6 to $12 a mailbox on most providers, easy to forget because it feels adjacent to the website rather than part of it.
- The redesign you will eventually pay for again. Whatever you build now has a shelf life. Most small-business sites get a real redesign, not just an update, somewhere around the three-to-five-year mark. That is effectively the build cost recurring on a cycle, worth knowing before you treat a website as a one-time purchase rather than an ongoing part of running the business.
Putting it together honestly: a DIY hosted builder is realistically $200 to $1,200 a year all in, and that is the ceiling on how cheap a real small-business website gets on a paid platform. A self-hosted WordPress brochure site realistically runs $360 to $1,800 a year once hosting, theme, and plugins are counted, more like $1,200 to $1,800 a year if it is an actual store on WooCommerce, plus whatever your time or a developer's time is worth for upkeep. A freelancer is $2,000 to $8,000 up front plus $1,000 to $4,000 a year after that if you want ongoing help. An agency build is $10,000 to $35,000 or more up front, plus a similar or larger ongoing retainer.
None of these is wrong. They are different products aimed at different situations, and the honest advice is to pick based on how much your time is worth and how much custom work the business genuinely needs, not on which number sounds smallest today.
Where a free, open-source platform changes the math.
Every path above carries a recurring bill baked into the platform itself. Devani, the CMS this blog runs on, does not, and that is the one thing worth understanding before you sign a renewal for another year.
The important thing to get right is that Devani is free and open-source, not a hosted plan with a monthly bill built in. There is no license fee, no plugin marketplace, no premium tier that unlocks basic features. You install it on your own hosting: a one-command installer takes a bare server to a live site, and it runs happily on a cheap VPS, something in the neighborhood of $5 a month. An optional managed hosting service with a free tier exists if you would rather not touch a server at all, but the base platform does not require it.
That changes the math on this whole article, because every other path carries a real recurring platform bill: a Squarespace or Wix subscription, WordPress hosting plus a theme plus plugin renewals, or an agency retainer. Devani's software cost is zero, permanently, so a straightforward small-business site's real ongoing cost lands close to whatever the cheap hosting runs, on the order of $60 a year plus a domain. No plugin-renewal notice arriving in June, no per-plugin fee stacking up as you add a contact form or SEO tools (both built in), no transaction fee tacked onto the store. Updates are opt-in on your own schedule, and it snapshots automatically before changes, so a bad edit is a one-click rollback, not a support ticket.
Every other path
A recurring bill built into the platform.
- ✓ Mature ecosystems, deep template libraries, and a decade of freelancer familiarity behind them.
- × A subscription, plugin renewals, or a retainer that never stops, plus the promo-to-renewal jump on most of them.
Devani
Free software, roughly $60 a year to run.
- ✓ $0 for the CMS, forever; forms and per-page SEO built in, no per-plugin fees, no added store transaction fee.
- × A younger, smaller ecosystem, fewer templates, and a light store rather than deep commerce.
The honest caveats, stated plainly: something still has to run that $5-a-month server, and while the installer makes it close to one command, it is a server, not a fully managed SaaS account, unless you opt into the managed tier. Devani is also younger than WordPress or the big hosted builders, with a much smaller ecosystem behind it, so a business that genuinely needs a specific WordPress plugin refined over a decade, or the enormous template libraries Squarespace and Wix have built up, will not find as deep a bench here yet. Its built-in store is a light store too, fine for a straightforward catalog and Stripe checkout, not a stand-in for serious commerce volume.
It also leans on something native that the other paths reach only through a plugin or bolt-on, if at all: connect your own ChatGPT or Claude account and the assistant works inside the builder to make real edits to your site's content and layout on request, the way you would ask a person to update a page, instead of hunting for a plugin setting or paying an hourly rate for a five-minute change. WordPress can get partway there now too, through add-ons like its own MCP integration or the Vibe AI plugin, but those are bolt-ons that work mainly in the block editor, not the builder itself. Devani's is native. That does not replace a freelancer for a full redesign. It replaces a lot of the small, constant upkeep that turns into someone's Saturday, or someone's invoice, on every other path in this article.
How much does a small business website cost per month?
Realistically $16 to $99 a month on a DIY builder like Squarespace or Wix with nothing else to pay for, or $30 to $150 a month for a self-hosted WordPress site once hosting, a theme, and plugins are added up (more like $100 to $150 for a WooCommerce store). A freelancer or agency build is a bigger one-time cost, $2,000 to $35,000 or more, plus a monthly retainer of $95 to $950 if you want ongoing help. A free, open-source CMS on a cheap server lands closest to the floor, on the order of $5 a month plus a domain.
Is it worth paying someone to build your site?
It is worth it when the business genuinely needs custom design and problem-solving a template cannot do, or when your time is worth more than the hours a DIY build would take. A freelancer at $2,000 to $8,000 buys real judgment for a professional small-business site; an agency at $10,000 and up buys strategy, copywriting, and photography direction for something more complex. If the site is a straightforward brochure or a simple store, a hosted builder or a free open-source CMS will get you there for far less, and the money is better spent elsewhere.
What is the cheapest way to get a small business website?
On a paid platform, a DIY hosted builder is the cheapest packaged option, realistically $200 to $1,200 a year all in. Below that, a free and open-source CMS installed on a cheap VPS drops the software cost to zero and leaves you paying mainly for the roughly $5-a-month server and a domain, about $60 a year plus the domain. The tradeoff is that the builder bundles everything for you, while the self-hosted route means you (or its optional managed free tier) are responsible for the server.
Can you build a business website for free?
The software can be free, but the website is not quite. Builder free plans (Wix, for instance) run ads, sit on a subdomain, and cannot sell anything, so they do not really work for a business. Open-source software like Devani costs nothing to license, but you still need somewhere to host it and a domain to point at it, roughly $60 a year combined, or a managed free tier if you would rather not run a server. "Free" almost always has an asterisk; the honest question is where the unavoidable cost lands.
Know the real number before you sign anything.
If you want to see what the free, open-source path actually looks like on a real site, devani.io is worth ten minutes before you sign a contract or a renewal notice for another year. No pressure to switch anything today, just worth knowing the option exists.