How much it costs to build a website depends mostly on whose hours you're paying for. A do-it-yourself site on a website builder costs a monthly subscription (Squarespace lists plans from $19 to $139 a month, as listed at the time of writing) plus your own time. A site built by a freelancer or agency is priced on their hours, which is why two quotes for "a website" can be very far apart. Then there are running costs every year: hosting, a domain, and someone to keep it all working. The useful question is less "what does a website cost" and more "what will this one take to build and keep current."
Three routes, three kinds of cost
| Route | What you pay for | What pushes the price up |
|---|---|---|
| Website builder, done yourself | A monthly or yearly subscription, with hosting included. | Higher plan tiers for extra features. Your own time, which is the real cost. |
| Freelancer or small studio | A project fee based on their hours, plus hosting. | Number of pages and layouts, copywriting, revisions. |
| Agency or custom build | Design, development, project management and testing hours, plus hosting and maintenance. | Integrations, unique layouts, migrating an old site, content written for you. |
The builder route
Builders such as Squarespace and Wix bundle hosting, templates and an editor into one subscription. Squarespace has four plans, with a discount for paying yearly. The lower tiers cover a simple company site; the higher ones add selling and marketing features most B2B companies won't use.
The subscription is the small part. Writing ten good service pages, choosing and resizing photos, setting up the contact form, connecting the domain and checking it all on a phone takes days of someone's time, and in most small companies that someone is the owner or an office manager who already has a full-time job and will be doing this in the evenings. Count those hours honestly.
The hired route
You're buying hours. That's why the quotes vary so much: one firm assumes five pages and your copy, another assumes forty pages they'll write.
A rough way to sanity-check a quote is to estimate the hours. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts median pay for web developers and digital designers at $47.85 an hour as of May 2025. That's what the person earns. A freelancer's or agency's rate is higher, since it has to cover their software, overhead, non-billable time and profit. So if a project needs 100 hours of work, about $4,800 is the wage cost alone, and the bill will be well above it. If a quote seems cheap for the scope, ask which hours are missing. Often it's the copy.
What drives the hours up:
- Pages and layouts. Many pages on one shared layout are cheaper than a few pages that each look different.
- Words. If you supply finished copy, it's cheaper. If they write it, it's often the biggest single line.
- Features. Quote forms that feed your CRM, scheduling, a client portal, a project gallery with filters.
- Migration. Moving an old site's pages across and redirecting every old address so you keep your search visibility.
- Revisions. Agree up front on how many rounds are included.
The costs after launch
A website is closer to a vehicle than a sign. It needs running costs.
Hosting. Builder plans include it. WordPress sites don't. For a WordPress site, managed hosting means the host takes care of software updates, backups and security for you. WP Engine, for example, lists its entry managed WordPress plan at $28 a month, billed annually, at the time of writing, with larger plans priced higher.
Domain. A yearly renewal. Small, but if it lapses, your site and your email go down together, and it can take days to sort out who still has the login to the registrar account.
Maintenance. Software updates, backup checks, fixing a form that stopped sending. Someone has to do it. Staff or retainer, it's a cost.
New content. This is the cost owners leave out of the budget, and the one that decides whether the site keeps being found. A site that never changes after launch gives search engines and AI assistants little reason to keep showing it. Budget for someone to add pages and articles every month, whether that's a person on your team with real time set aside for it, a freelance writer who understands what you sell, or a service that handles it, or accept that the site will slowly fade from the results.
Paying monthly instead
Some companies would rather not pay a large build fee and then run the site themselves. A managed program rolls the build, hosting, maintenance and new content into one monthly fee.
That's how Inbound SDR works. Packages start at $1,000 per month on a 12-month term. For that, we build your website, up to 100 pages, in the first month, planned around every service you sell and every area you serve. We host it and keep it healthy with ongoing monitoring, publish a new blog every business day and post it to up to 3 social platforms, keep your Google Business Profile and directory listings accurate, and put two to three expert hours a month into technical fixes and page changes. You have a dedicated strategist and get a monthly report.
It's more than you need if you want a five-page site you'll rarely touch; a builder subscription is the cheaper answer there. It also doesn't include paid ads, email marketing or review management.
Quick answers
What's the cheapest way to get a business website?
A website builder on a lower plan, built yourself. Cheap in dollars, costly in hours.
Why do website quotes vary so much?
Each firm is pricing a different amount of work. Ask every bidder for the page count, who writes the copy, how many revisions are included, and what happens after launch, then compare like with like.
Should I budget for the website every year?
Yes. Hosting, domain and maintenance recur, and a site that gets new content keeps working harder than one that doesn't.
Get the next one in your inbox
New playbooks, benchmarks and guides from our sales floor, for owners and sales leaders who sell to businesses. One email a month. See past issues.
