How much does a website cost?

The honest answer is a range, and anyone who gives you a single number before looking at your site is guessing. So here is the range, where it comes from, and the four things that actually move it. Every figure is dated and attributed. Prices as of September 2026.

What does a website cost, in one table?

Four routes, the price each actually charges, and — the column most pricing pages leave out — what you are still paying in year two.

The agency band is not a straw man. Clutch's published web design pricing guide puts it at "$2,000 to $100,000" and adds that "most web design projects reviewed on Clutch usually cost less than $10,000" (September 2026). Their stated average, $38,105.39, is dragged upwards by a small number of very large projects — which is exactly why the median matters more than the mean when you are the small project.

Why is the range so wide?

Because "a website" describes four different amounts of work, and the price follows the hours rather than the pages. Four things move it, in roughly this order.

The first row is the one worth arguing about, because it is usually the largest share of the bill and it is the one nobody prices separately. Chasing a client for photos, opening hours and service descriptions is most of what makes a small business website slow, and slow is what makes it expensive. If your content is already published on your existing site, that work has already been done and you should not pay for it twice.

What is a normal hourly rate for web design?

Two independent numbers, and they bracket the answer usefully.

The BLS figure is the floor under all of it: $99,520 a year, $47.85 an hour, for employed web developers and digital designers, with employment projected to "grow 5 percent from 2025 to 2035, faster than the average for all occupations". That is a salary, before a freelancer's unbilled hours, tax, software and the time spent finding the next client. A build quoted far below it is not the same work cheaper. It is fewer hours, or somebody else's hours.

How much does a website cost per month?

Three unrelated things get called a monthly website cost, the numbers overlap, and the work does not. Establish which one you are being quoted before you compare anything.

A $16 builder plan and a $199 managed plan are not competing offers. One is a tool and one is labour. The comparison only becomes fair when you add your own hours to the first at whatever your hour is worth, and most people find that the arithmetic changes.

What does a website cost in year two?

This is the number that decides whether a build was a good deal, and it is the number almost nobody publishes. A one-off build has a year two as well — it is just unlabelled.

Run your own numbers rather than ours. Take the quote, add two years of hosting, add the hours you will realistically need at their published rate, and add the renewal on anything they registered for you. Compare that figure against a monthly plan's two-year total. Sometimes the one-off still wins — a site that will never change again is genuinely cheaper bought once — and when it does, buy it.

How much does a website cost per year?

Add the recurring lines rather than the build. A one-off site costs, per year, its hosting ($60–$360), its domain ($10–$20), and whatever hours it needs from somebody — call it two to four at their rate, which on the agency figures above is $200 to $600. That is roughly $270 to $980 a year for a site nobody is actively looking after. A managed plan folds all of it into one line: ours is $828 a year, everything included.

How do I get a website design quote worth comparing?

Ask every supplier for the same five numbers, in writing, and compare those instead of the headline. Anything else is comparing a build price against a service.

1. The build price, and what is excluded from it
2. Hosting, per year, and who is responsible for renewing it
3. The hourly rate for changes after launch
4. What happens to the site if you stop paying
5. The notice period and any exit fee

On "affordable": treat it as a claim about the total, not the deposit. The cheapest build with the domain in someone else's name and edits at $150 an hour is not affordable — it is a low first invoice. Total two years of every recurring line, then decide.

Why will nobody give me a price?

Because a range this wide is easier to defend in a meeting than on a page, and because a quote request is a lead. It is the most common complaint about this industry, and it is not subtle: one published breakdown of web design complaints describes firms that "refuse to disclose costs upfront, forcing clients to submit forms repeatedly" (DevignTech, 10 Common Complaints About Web Design Companies).

There is a legitimate version of the objection — a shop and a brochure site genuinely are not the same job — and a way to answer it anyway: publish bands with the assumptions attached, which is what the table at the top of this page is. If a supplier cannot describe what changes their price, that is information about the supplier.

What does Fablence charge, and why that number?

$299 once, charged only when you approve the design, then $69 a month. Year one is $1,127; every year after it is $828. Nothing is charged before you have seen the design and said yes.

It works at that price for one reason, and it is the first row of the table above: your services, hours, photos and wording are already published on your current site, so we take them from there and you send us nothing. The expensive half of a small business website is collecting the content, and for you it is already collected. If you have no site yet, that advantage does not exist and we will say so.

An online shop is a separate service rather than part of that number. We build the storefront and you host it on Shopify, so Shopify carries the checkout, the payments, the tax rules and the uptime — and it is priced per build, because there is nothing of ours to host.

What the monthly plan does not buy: a booking system, a custom web app, a membership portal, or a multi-location franchise site. Those are real projects with real budgets and we do not take them on. If that is what you are pricing, the agency band at the top of this page is the honest place to be looking, and how to hire a web designer is the more useful page.

Next: what belongs in a package at each price, or freelancer versus agency if you have not decided who should do the work.