The real price bands
DIY builders: $200–600/year forever, plus your time. Fine for testing an idea; costly once you count the weekends and the ceiling you hit the first time you need something the template cannot do.
Freelancer marketplaces: $100–500, wildly variable quality, and the cheap end is usually a template with your logo dropped in.
Independent developers: $200–1,500 for a genuinely custom build from someone who both designs and codes. Best value bracket for most small businesses.
Agencies: $3,000–20,000+. Justified for large brands with many stakeholders; for a single-location business you are mostly buying meetings.
The hidden costs people miss
Not owning your own domain (a wixsite.com address ranks like an afterthought and looks like one). Monthly platform fees that never end. A site nobody can measure — if there is no analytics, you cannot know whether the website has ever produced a customer. And lock-in: if you cannot take the code and leave, you do not own the site, you rent it.
The five-point checklist
Whoever you hire, require: (1) your own domain, in your name; (2) fixed price before work starts; (3) mobile speed — most of your visitors are on phones; (4) analytics included, so you can see visits turning into calls and orders; (5) you own the code at the end.
For calibration: Clauser Studio builds landing pages for $200–400 and full sites for $300–800, live in about a week, free analytics and conversion tracking included, everything in your name. You see a free homepage draft before paying anything — which is also a fair test to put to anyone else you talk to.
Last updated 2026-07-19