The honest answer

It depends. Since that is unhelpful, here is a framework. The market splits into three tiers, and which one you belong in depends on what your website is for. Let’s walk through each, what you get, and what it really costs.

Tier 1 — $0, DIY site builders

Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, the free tier of WordPress.com. You build it yourself with drag-and-drop tools on a monthly subscription. You pick a template, swap in your logo, change the colors, and publish.

What you get: a website that exists. It will look like a template because it is a template. It will load slower than it should because the builder loads every possible feature for every possible visitor. The SEO controls are limited. The HTML is messy. You do not own the code — you rent the platform, and if the platform raises prices or shuts down a feature, you absorb it.

When this makes sense: you have zero budget, you need something today, and you do not care about standing out. A brand-new hobby project. A side business you are testing. An event page for a one-off. For these, free is honest.

When it stops making sense: the moment your website is part of how you get customers. At that point the free site is actively costing you money in lost leads, and it does not show up on any invoice.

Tier 2 — $199 to $799, a real website

This is the tier we operate in, so we will be specific about it. A custom-built site, fast by default, optimized for search, with clean hand-written code that you own outright.

What you actually get for that money:

  1. Design decisions. Typography, layout, color, visual hierarchy, spacing. Good design is invisible — the reader never notices it, they just find the page easy to use. Bad design is the first thing they notice, and it costs you trust before they read a word.
  2. A technical foundation. Semantic HTML, organized CSS, performance built in. This is the part that determines whether your site loads in under a second and whether Google can read it.
  3. SEO setup done correctly. Title tags, meta descriptions, structured data, sitemaps, canonical URLs, image alt text. If these are wrong, Google will not show your site to anyone. Most DIY sites get half of them wrong.
  4. Content structure. What pages you need, what order they go in, what each one says, and how they guide a visitor toward contacting you.

When this makes sense: you have a real business and your website is part of how customers find and evaluate you. Plumbers, accountants, restaurants, consultants, clinics, agencies, shops. If a customer might Google your service and decide whether to call based on what they see, you belong here.

Tier 3 — $5,000 to $50,000+, an agency

A team of designers, developers, project managers, and possibly strategists. Multiple rounds of revisions. Custom illustration and photography. Integration with your CRM, your booking system, your inventory. A documented design system. Probably a three- to six-month timeline.

A chart comparing the three website pricing tiers and what each includes

When this makes sense: you are a funded startup, an established company with complex needs, or a brand where the website itself is a core product. If you need authenticated user areas, a custom CMS, multi-language support, or a deep integration with internal tools, this is the right tier.

When it does not make sense: you are a five-page local business and someone quoted you $20,000. You are being oversold. A $20,000 site will not bring you four times the leads of a $5,000 site. It will look more polished and it will be more flexible, but the marginal lead generation past a certain point is small.

What you are actually paying for

Across all three tiers, when you pay someone to build a website, you are paying for four things. The cheap options give you almost none of them.

The first is judgment. A good developer has built hundreds of sites and knows which decisions compound and which ones look good for a week and hurt you for years. You are paying for the mistakes they have already made on other people’s projects.

The second is technical execution. The HTML structure, the CSS architecture, the performance budget, the SEO plumbing. This is invisible when it is done right and expensive when it is done wrong.

The third is speed. A fast site ranks better, converts better, and costs less to run. Speed is a design decision made on day one, not an optimization you bolt on later.

The fourth is ownership. When the project ends, the code is yours. You can host it anywhere, edit it in any text editor, hand it to any developer. No CMS subscription, no plugin fees, no lock-in.

The cheapest tier — DIY — gives you none of the first three and questionable ownership of the fourth. You get a template and a drag-and-drop editor, and you carry the platform’s limitations forever.

Why we charge what we charge

Our pricing is straightforward. A starter site begins at $199. A full business site is $399. A premium build with custom motion and deeper content is $799.

We can hold prices there for two reasons. First, we build on Astro, which is fast to build, fast to deploy, and needs almost no ongoing maintenance. The tooling does a lot of the work that agencies bill hourly for. Second, we do not have project managers or account executives or a sales pipeline to feed. The person you talk to is the person who builds your site, and that removes an entire layer of overhead.

For ongoing growth, we add $79 a month for SEO work. That is where the value compounds. Month after month, your rankings climb, your traffic grows, and the site you already paid for starts pulling in more leads without you touching it.

The hidden cost of cheap

A free Wix site costs you nothing upfront. But if it loads in five seconds, ranks on page seven of Google, and makes your business look indistinguishable from every other Wix site in your industry — what is the real cost?

Calculate it this way. If a faster, better-ranked site would bring you even two extra customers a month, and your average customer is worth $500, that is $1,000 a month the free site is costing you. Over a year, $12,000. The “free” site is the most expensive option on the table.

This is the math most business owners never do, because the cost is invisible. It shows up as leads you never received, not as a line item on a bill.

How to decide

Ask one question: is my website part of how I get customers?

If the answer is no — if it is purely a placeholder, or a link you put on a business card so people can confirm you exist — then free is fine. Build it yourself and move on.

If the answer is yes, then the question is not whether to spend money on your site. It is how much, and where. For the vast majority of small businesses, the answer is Tier 2. A real site, built once, that works for years. Not the cheapest option. Not the most expensive. The one that fits.

Want a real website at a price that fits a real business? See our pricing or tell us about your project.