It is the first question almost every business owner asks, and the honest answer is that it depends on what you actually need. A simple website to show your services and let people contact you is a very different job from a site that takes bookings, collects payments, or connects to the tools you already use. So instead of a single number, it helps to understand what actually moves the price.
What drives the cost of a website
A few things make the biggest difference:
- How many pages and how much content. A focused one-page or five-page site is quicker to build than a large site with many sections.
- Custom build or template. A site built from scratch is designed around your business and loads fast. A template is cheaper up front but often slower and harder to change later.
- What it needs to do. Showing information is simple. Taking bookings, accepting card payments, or syncing with your calendar and records is more involved, and worth it when it saves you hours.
- Design and branding. Using what you already have costs less than building a full brand look from scratch.
Why the cheapest option can cost you more
A low template price can look attractive, but the real cost shows up later. Slow templates lose customers on mobile, they are awkward to update, and you often end up paying again to rebuild properly. Paying once for a fast, custom site that fits your business is usually cheaper over time than paying twice.
So what does a website actually cost?
Prices vary more than ever, so it helps to know the range. At the low end, you can now get a website for as little as $500, often generated quickly with AI tools. The catch is that cheap rarely means good: these sites tend to be slow, generic, poorly optimised, and awkward to change, so they look fine until you actually need them to win customers. At the other end, established agencies often charge $5,000 and up, largely to cover their overheads and client volume rather than because your site genuinely needs to cost that much.
A well-built, fast, custom website for a small business usually lands somewhere in between, in the region of $1,000 to $2,000 depending on scope. That is where our projects sit. We come in well below big agency pricing, but rather than charging a flat rate we price to the actual workload of your project, so you only pay for what your business genuinely needs.
Because every business is different, we scope and price each project individually, and you get a clear, itemised estimate before any work begins.
A good first step is to run our free website speed test to see how your current site performs, or book a free consultation call and we will give you a realistic estimate and timeline for exactly what you need.