What a small business website really costs in 2026

A small business website costs anywhere from about $200 a year to tens of thousands, and where you land depends almost entirely on one question: who does the work, and who keeps doing it. Freedom35 Web Design sits at the low end of that range on purpose — we build custom sites free in about seven days, and keeping one costs $180 to $1,200 a year, prices published. This page puts our number next to everyone else's, with the three-year totals worked out, because the three-year total is the only figure that never lies.

What does each route cost?

Five ways to get a website, priced per year and over three years. The build-cost and monthly ranges are the ones we publish and keep checked on our homepage — last checked August 2026 — and the totals are just multiplication. Vendors change prices, so treat the ranges as shapes, not quotes; the arithmetic you can redo yourself.

What does each price level actually buy?

The same information, sliced the other way — what you should expect at each level of annual spend, whoever provides it.

• Under $250 a year buys existence, done adequately: a handful of pages, a contact form, hosting. That is a DIY builder plan, where you supply the labor, or our Hobby plan, where we do. Nothing wrong with this level — most personal projects and plenty of small businesses need exactly this and no more.
• $500 to $1,500 a year buys stewardship: someone answerable keeps the site current, secure and found. Agency care plans live here, usually without a build attached; our Business plan lives here with one. At this level you should never be doing your own updates — that is the thing being bought.
• $1,500 to $3,600 a year buys machinery: booking, payments, customer accounts, dashboards. The subscription vendors' upper tiers sit in this band. Our Pro plan does this work at $1,200, just under it, because the machinery is assembled from our own toolkit rather than billed as custom development.
• Above that is genuine custom software — stores, marketplaces, integrations, multi-location. Everyone quotes this individually, including us: typically $2,400–$4,800 a year, with the build quoted rather than free.

The failure mode to avoid is paying one band's price for the band below's product — software money for pages, or stewardship money for a site nobody actually stewards. The three-year total tells you what you are paying; this list tells you what it should have bought.

What actually drives the price?

Three things, and they are not the three most people expect.

• How much the site has to do. A brochure — pages, photos, a contact form — is cheap everywhere. The price jumps when the site takes bookings, moves money, or holds customer accounts, because at that point it stops being pages and becomes software. This is the real line between our $600 and $1,200 plans.
• Who does the updates, forever. The build happens once; the updates happen for the life of the business. Hourly billing, care plans, and your own evenings are all prices for the same ongoing work, just shaped differently. Ask any vendor what an ordinary text change costs in year two.
• How the vendor gets paid. The same site costs wildly different totals depending on whether the money arrives as a build fee, a monthly subscription, or an annual plan. More on that below, because it is where most of the pricing games live.

What matters less than people think: visual polish, which templates have commoditized, and hosting itself, which costs vendors very little at small-business scale. If a quote is high, the money is going to labor or margin, not servers.

Why is "per month" the wrong unit?

Because it is chosen to sound small. $99 a month reads like lunch money; it is $1,188 a year and $3,564 over three years, which is more than many agencies charge for the same site, paid on drip. Nobody advertising a monthly price puts the three-year figure next to it, which is exactly why you should compute it — multiply by 36 and compare. Every number on this page is stated per year and per three years for that reason, including ours.

The monthly-versus-annual question has enough moving parts — incentives, cancellation terms, who keeps the site — that we gave it its own page, with the math worked. The "$99 a month" category specifically gets a teardown of its own: what those plans total over three years, and what happens when you cancel.

What are the hidden costs?

• Your domain: $12–15 a year, whoever builds the site. Anyone bundling it "free" is either absorbing a small cost or registering it in their own name. The second one is how clients get trapped, and it is worth a page of its own.
• Card processing. Stripe and Square take their percentage on every transaction, everywhere, for everyone. A vendor quoting "payments included" means the plumbing, not the fees.
• The plugin economy. On WordPress and the builder platforms, features you assumed were included — booking, galleries, forms that do anything — often arrive as paid add-ons at $5–30 a month each. They accumulate quietly.
• Redesigns. Sites age. A rebuild every few years is a real cost of the pay-once routes that never appears in the original quote.
• Your time. DIY's invoice. The platform fee is the small part; the evenings are the large part, and they recur with every update you make yourself.

What are our real numbers?

One worked example, so this page practices what it preaches. A service business — a plumber, a tutor, a salon — on our Business plan:

• Build: $0, finished in about seven days, seen and approved before any payment — the full process is here
• Plan: $600 a year, prepaid — hosting, SSL, SEO basics, Google Business Profile setup, a monthly traffic email, and 12 update requests a year
• Domain: $12–15 a year, paid by you, direct to the registrar, in your name
• Three-year total: about $1,840, every dollar of it listed above

The other two plans bracket that example. Hobby at $180 a year is for sites that only need to exist well — a portfolio, a club, five pages and a contact form. Pro at $1,200 a year is for sites with a job: appointment booking, card payments through your own Stripe account, customer accounts, a staff dashboard — work that is normally quoted as custom software. Bigger than Pro — stores, marketplaces, multi-location — is quoted individually, typically $2,400–$4,800 a year. There is no setup fee on any plan, year two costs the same as year one, and the price you start on is locked for as long as you stay. What is deliberately not included is published too, on the pricing page, because "unlimited support" means nothing.

Is the result any good? We keep live client sites you can click through rather than mockups, so you can judge that yourself.

What should you refuse to pay for?

Whatever route you take, these line items are red flags on any quote:

• A setup fee on top of a subscription. The subscription already finances the build; a setup fee is paying for it twice.
• A domain registered in the vendor's name, or a markup on renewing your own. The registrar charges $12–15; anything beyond that is either margin or a leash.
• Guaranteed rankings. Nobody can honestly promise you a Google position — Google itself says firms that guarantee rankings should be reported. Pay for work you can verify, never for a promised outcome.
• Per-edit fees with no published rate. If changing a phone number costs "it depends", it will depend upward.
• "Unlimited" anything without a definition. Unlimited support that takes three weeks per reply is a limit wearing a costume.
• A fee to get your own content back. Leaving should cost you effort at most, never ransom.

When is the cheap option the right one?

Sometimes, and honestly. A Wix or Squarespace site you build yourself is the right call when the budget is genuinely near zero, when you need something published today, when you enjoy the fiddling, or when the business idea is still unproven — a $200-a-year builder plan you actually publish beats a $2,000 site you never commission. If all you need is one page and a booking link, a builder is plenty, and a designer — us included — is overkill.

The builder stops being cheap at the point the site has a job to do, or the point your evenings run out. That is the honest boundary, and which side of it you are on is knowable before you spend anything.

How do you compare two quotes?

Reduce both to the same four numbers and most of the fog clears:

• The three-year total, with hosting, maintenance and the domain included. Multiply monthly figures by 36. If a vendor resists producing this number, that is itself information.
• The price of an ordinary update in year two. A text change, a new photo, an updated price — in writing. This is where cheap builds get expensive.
• The cost of leaving. Who owns the domain, what happens to the site when you stop paying, what an export costs. Our answers are on the pricing page; get theirs on paper before signing anything.
• The evidence. Live sites you can visit and test on your own phone, not mockups. A vendor whose existing sites load slowly is showing you your future.

Common questions

How much should a small business pay per year for a website?

For a site that is professionally built and professionally kept — hosting, security, and updates handled — somewhere between roughly $200 and $1,200 a year is defensible in 2026. Above that, you should be getting software: booking, payments, accounts, dashboards. If you are paying more and getting pages, ask what the money is doing.

Why is the same website $500 from one vendor and $5,000 from another?

Usually it isn't the same website — it is the same screenshot. The differences hide in what happens after launch: who does updates and at what price, how fast the site loads, who owns the domain, and what leaving costs. Two quotes can only be compared as three-year totals with the exit terms attached.

How much does website maintenance cost?

Bought separately, care plans commonly run $50–$150 a month — often more per year than our entire plans, without a build attached. What that money actually buys, and when it is worth paying, is worked through in our maintenance-cost breakdown. On our plans there is no separate maintenance line: hosting, security and your update allowance are what the annual price is.

Is the free build really free?

Yes, and there is still a catch — ours is the annual plan, and we published it in full rather than making you hunt: here is our catch, itemized.