Price ranges for DIY builders, freelancers, agencies and subscriptions, the monthly costs nobody quotes, and what plumbers, detailers and contractors pay.
A small business website costs anywhere from $0 to about $25,000 up front, plus $20 to $500 a month to keep it running. Where you land depends on who builds it: you, a freelancer, an agency, or a company that rents you a website by the month.
The up-front number is the one everybody asks about. The monthly number is the one you pay for years, and it's where the surprises are.
Disclosure: we sell websites, so I have a horse in this race. Our prices are further down, in full, along with when you shouldn't buy from us. Where a company publishes its prices, I link the page I checked in October 2026. Where nobody publishes prices, the ranges are what we typically see in the quotes owners show us: our observation, not a survey.
A DIY builder costs about $20 to $50 a month plus your time. A template shop or freelancer usually quotes $1,000 to $5,000 up front, and an agency build usually runs $5,000 to $25,000. A website subscription runs about $100 to $500 a month, with anywhere from $0 to a few thousand dollars up front.
| Build type | Cost up front | Monthly | Who owns it | Who maintains it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder (Squarespace, Wix) | $0 plus your time | $19 to $49 on Squarespace's annual plans | Your content and domain, but the site lives on their platform | You |
| Template shop | About $1,000 to $1,500 (our observation) | Hosting, often billed separately | Usually you, but check the contract | You, or paid by the hour |
| Freelancer | About $1,500 to $5,000 (our observation) | Hosting and care, if offered | Usually you, but check the contract | The freelancer, while they're available |
| Agency | About $5,000 to $25,000 (our observation) | A care plan or retainer | Varies, so read the exit terms | The agency |
| Website subscription | $0 to about $3,300 | About $99 to $500, more for bigger bundles | Varies: some vendors keep the content or charge a buyout | The vendor |
| TechBridge agentic website | $750 to $2,500 | $250 to $500 | You: domain, content and code | We do, and the agent proposes updates you approve |
Squarespace publishes plans at $19, $29, $49 and $99 a month billed annually, or $25 to $139 billed month to month, and the annual plans include a free domain for the first year (Squarespace pricing). Wix also has a free plan.
The real cost is your time: a few weekends to build it, and an hour here and there to keep it current.
A template shop drops your logo, text and photos into a design it has used before. What you usually don't get is anything after launch: no new pages, no updates, and nobody checking that the form still works.
A freelancer gets you closer to custom. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts median pay for web developers and digital designers at $47.85 an hour as of May 2025, and that's an employee's wage, before a freelancer's own overhead (BLS). At that rate, $1,000 buys about 20 hours of work, so a custom quote far below that should make you ask what's being left out.
The bigger risk is continuity. When your freelancer takes a full-time job, your site is orphaned, and you find out the day something breaks.
Agencies add strategy, copywriting, photography and a project manager, and they price accordingly. Hook Agency, which serves home-services companies and publishes its prices, lists a standard website at $1,000 a month for 12 months ($12,000) and a custom one at $2,000 a month ($24,000), with a yearly commitment (Hook Agency).
Also called website as a service: the vendor builds, hosts and maintains the site for a monthly fee. Published prices I checked:
There isn't an average worth quoting. A $19-a-month builder site and a $24,000 agency build are both "a small business website," so any single average blends products that have nothing in common.
Pick the category first. For an established service business that wants a site built for it, the freelancer quotes we see typically land in the low thousands, and agency quotes start around $5,000 and climb into five figures.
Six things set the price: how many pages, custom design or a template, who supplies the words and photos, what the site connects to, whether an old site has to be migrated, and what happens after launch.
The costs missing from the first quote are hosting, the domain, changes after launch, security updates, the next redesign, and the price of leaving a vendor who controls your site.
About $20 to $50 a month if you run it yourself on a builder. About $50 to $300 a month for hosting plus a care plan from a freelancer or agency, in the quotes we see. About $100 to $500 a month for a subscription where the vendor does the work.
Compare what's included, not just the total: keeping the lights on and getting new content every month are different products. If you're also budgeting for search, the same math for SEO is in how much should a service business spend on SEO.
Maintenance, meaning hosting, security updates, backups and small changes, typically runs $50 to $300 a month from a freelancer or agency in the quotes we see, or it's billed by the hour. Subscriptions include it.
Ask any maintenance quote one question: how many changes a month are included, and what happens when you need more?
A redesign costs about what a new build costs in the same category, because it is one. The line people forget is migration: moving your content and setting up 301 redirects so the rankings your old site earned survive the switch.
If your current site brings in work from Google, get migration in the quote, in writing. That's why our Market Leader Edition includes content migration, 301 redirects and Google Business Profile preservation in the build fee.
For an established plumbing company, expect about $100 to $500 a month on a subscription, a few thousand dollars up front for a freelancer build, or five figures from a full-service agency. Whatever you pay for, the site needs click-to-call on every page, emergency and service-area pages, and a form that reaches you fast.
Published examples: 99 Calls starts at $99 a month plus $249 setup, Footbridge Media charges $249 a month with free design, and Hook Agency lists its standard website at $12,000 over 12 months.
Ours is the Market Leader Edition: $2,500 to build and $500 a month, up to 20 pages, migration included. The details are on our plumber websites page.
A detailing shop can run a builder site for about $20 to $50 a month, buy a template site for about $1,000 to $1,500, or pay a subscription of about $170 to $350 a month.
The detailing-specific comparison is Detailers Roadmap: $2,300 to $3,300 setup plus $169.99 to $239.99 a month on a one-year commitment. Our Detailer Edition is $750 to build plus $250 a month, live in 14 days, and month to month after launch. Year one comes to $3,750 for ours, against about $4,340 for Detailers Roadmap's entry package ($2,300 plus 12 months at $169.99). More on our auto detailing website page.
Contractors and home-service companies see the same ranges as plumbers: about $100 to $500 a month on a subscription, a few thousand dollars up front for a freelancer build, or five figures from an agency. Your size, and how much work already comes from Google, matter more than your trade.
Under about $750K a year, our Crew Edition is $1,500 to build plus $300 a month, with up to 7 custom pages. Above that, the Market Leader Edition is $2,500 plus $500 a month. Both are on our home-services websites page.
We build agentic websites: a website with an AI agent behind it. Three editions, each a one-time build fee plus a monthly that covers hosting, care and your agent, month to month after launch.
Detailer Edition: $750 build + $250/mo. For detailing, PPF, tint and ceramic-coating shops. The proven 7-page detailing website system, customized to your shop, with online booking, before/after galleries, package and pricing pages, and the Google Business Profile and local SEO foundation. 1 human-requested change a month. Live in 14 days.
Crew Edition: $1,500 build + $300/mo. For service businesses under about $750K a year. Up to 7 custom pages, custom design for your trade with no template, online booking, and the Google Business Profile and local SEO foundation. 2 human-requested changes and 1 care-hour a month. Payment plan: 3 × $500 across your first three months. Live in 21 days.
Market Leader Edition: $2,500 build + $500/mo. For plumbers and home-services companies doing $750K+ a year. Up to 20 pages, including service-area and emergency pages, with online booking, plus content migration, 301 redirects and Google Business Profile preservation, so the rankings you already earned come with you. 4 human-requested changes and 2 care-hours a month. Live in 21 days.
On every edition, each inquiry is captured into your leads list and you're alerted when it lands. The agent behind the site makes short videos from your job photos, drafts review requests after jobs you mark won, and hands you SEO recommendations, and its work waits in a review queue for your approval. It doesn't answer your phone, and it doesn't reply to leads for you. You make that call.
Year one comes to $3,750 on Detailer, $5,100 on Crew and $8,500 on Market Leader, and none of it is ad spend. If you convert to annual within 90 days, it's $2,500, $3,000 or $5,000 a year, and part or all of your build fee is credited.
Two guarantees, word for word as we publish them:
The Launch Guarantee. Live in 21 days from kickoff, or your build fee back. Detailer Edition: 14 days.
The Ownership Guarantee. Your domain, your content, your code. Full export anytime once your build fee has cleared. No contracts, no buyouts.
The one client number we publish: Lee Dean of LogoHammer saw more than double the visitors finding him directly, and triple from Google. That story is in the LogoHammer case study, and the rest of our builds are on our work page. The full scope is on the Agentic Websites page.
If you're a side hustle, pre-revenue, or your whole marketing budget is a couple hundred dollars a month, use a DIY builder. A $19-a-month site with your phone number, services, service area and real photos beats no site, and it beats a site you can't afford to keep.
Other honest cases:
For a template site, $1,500 is normal. For a custom site from a freelancer, it's on the low end of what we see, so ask how many pages you get, who writes the words, and what happens after launch.
Pay for the category that fits the business. For an established service business, a few thousand dollars up front plus a monthly that includes care is a reasonable target.
Yes. Wix has a free plan, and your Google Business Profile costs nothing. Wix's free plan doesn't include your own domain, though, and a business without one looks less established.
AI tools can draft pages and copy quickly, and some builders now generate a first version for you. The page was never the expensive part. Hosting, your domain, local SEO, catching leads and keeping the site current every month are where the cost lives.
If customers search for what you do in your area, yes: the website is where that search turns into a call. If all your work is repeat and referral, a simple site that proves you're real may be enough.
If you already have a quote in hand, book a 15-minute call and bring it. No pitch deck. I'll tell you what's in it, what's missing, and whether the price is fair, and sometimes the answer is "sign it, that's a good deal."
Text, email and in-person scripts for asking customers for Google reviews, where to find your review link and QR code, and what Google and the FTC ban.
Six places a service business website loses the customer after the click, how to tell which one is yours, and exactly what we do about it week by week.
15-minute call, no pitch deck. We’ll tell you straight whether an Agentic Website, the Platform, or neither is the right place to start.