What a small business website
actually costs.

There is no single market rate for a website, because "a website" covers everything from a one-page profile to a booking system. For a typical small business site — five or so pages, a contact form, and search basics — these are the ranges you'll actually be quoted in 2026:

• DIY site builders: $0–$40 a month, plus your own time. Cheap on paper; the real cost is the weekend you spend on it and the template look it never quite loses.
• Marketplace freelancers: $150–$800. Enormously variable. Communication and revisions are where these projects usually come apart.
• Independent freelancers: $1,000–$3,500. Usually good work, usually one person, usually a queue.
• Small studios: $200–$2,000. Fixed scope, fixed price, direct contact with whoever is building it. This is where Casvori sits, at $199, $299 and $499.
• Agencies: $4,000–$15,000+, plus retainers. Real capability, real overhead — you pay for account management, strategy decks, and the office.

Underneath any quote, only a few things genuinely cost money:

• The domain: roughly $10–$20 a year at cost for a .com. Anyone charging $100 a year for a standard domain is adding margin, not value.
• SSL certificate: effectively free now. If it's a line item, ask why.
• Hosting: a small business site costs very little to serve. Charges above roughly $30 a month usually bundle support, not servers.
• Design and build time: the honest majority of any quote. This is what you're really buying.
• Stock photography, fonts, and paid plugins: occasionally real, and should be listed separately rather than folded into a round number.

Everything else — "strategy sessions", "discovery phases", "project management" — may be worthwhile on a large build. On a five-page site for a local business, they are usually the difference between a $499 quote and a $5,000 one.

The build price is the headline; the running cost is what you live with. Budget for three things: keeping the domain registered, keeping the site online, and paying for changes.

Change pricing is where quotes differ most. Some studios bill hourly with a one-hour minimum, which turns a ten-minute text edit into a real invoice. Others use a flat per-edit rate, or a monthly plan that covers routine edits. Ask specifically: "What does it cost to change my opening hours?" The answer tells you more than the brochure.

For reference, we charge a flat $9.99 for any single update, or $35, $25 and $15 a month on our Essential, Signature and Premium care plans, which cover routine edits. Hosting, domain and SSL stay included either way — a lapsed care plan never takes a site offline.

• Who owns the domain, and can I move it out at any time, free?
• What exactly is included at this price, page by page?
• How many rounds of changes are included, and for how long?
• What does a single edit cost after launch?
• Is hosting separate, and what happens if I stop paying it?
• Who do I actually talk to — the builder, or an account manager?
• What happens to the site and the files if we part ways?

Price mostly tracks overhead, not craft. A studio with no sales team, no office and no layers of management can charge a fraction of an agency rate for comparable work, because almost all of the money goes into the build itself.

What low prices should never mean: shared templates sold as custom work, a domain held hostage, or silence after launch. Judge a quote on scope, ownership, and how changes are handled — not on the number alone.

Nothing here is a promise about traffic, rankings or revenue; it's a description of what the work typically costs. Any figures quoted for other providers are general market ranges, not offers.