Ask five web designers what a website costs and you will get five wildly different answers. One says $299. One says $18,000. Both of them are telling the truth about their own business, which is exactly why the question is so frustrating to ask.
So let's take the mystery out of it. Here is what you are actually paying for, and roughly what each piece is worth.
The setup fee pays for the thinking, not the typing
Building the pages is the fast part. The slow part is figuring out what the pages should say, what a visitor needs to see in the first four seconds, and how someone goes from landing on your homepage to picking up the phone.
A cheap setup fee usually means that thinking did not happen. You get a template with your logo dropped in the corner. It looks fine. It converts poorly, and you will not know why.
The monthly fee pays for the site not falling over
Hosting, an SSL certificate, security patches, backups, and someone to call when something breaks. If nobody is charging you for these, either they are bundled into a bigger number somewhere else or nobody is doing them.
The unglamorous truth is that most abandoned small business websites did not get hacked or crash. They just slowly went stale until the owner was embarrassed to link to them.
Where the money actually goes
- Design and layout: the biggest single chunk of a setup fee
- Copywriting: expensive when it is done well, and worth it
- Photography or licensed stock: usually a few hundred dollars if you need it
- SEO setup: the structural work that decides whether Google can read your site
- Hosting and SSL: small monthly cost, not optional
- Ongoing updates: either your hourly rate or someone else's
What we charge, and why
Our setup fees start at $399 with monthly service at $49. That covers design, unlimited pages, copywriting, SEO, hosting, SSL, and updates handled by us. Pricing is based on the size of your company rather than the size of your site, because a ten page site for a solo operator should not cost the same as a ten page site for a fifty person firm.
The reason we can price that way is that we are not selling you hours. We are selling you a website that works, and then keeping it working.
The one number that matters more than price
What does one new customer earn you? If a single job is worth $800 and your website brings in one extra job a year, almost any reasonable price pays for itself. If your site brings in nothing, even $299 was too much.
That is the real test. Not the invoice, the return. Ask any designer you are considering how their sites get found, and listen carefully to the answer.