Pricing
How much does a business website actually cost?
Every agency answers this with 'it depends'. Here are the actual ranges we quote, what pushes a project up or down, and the costs that only show up after launch.
Fakhar Zaman
14 July 2026 · 8 min read
The short version
- A small business marketing site sits between $749 and $2,500 in most cases.
- Scope, not page count, drives the price. Ten near-identical service pages cost less than one custom booking flow.
- Hosting, domain, email and a maintenance plan are ongoing costs. Budget roughly $25 to $150 a month depending on the build.
- A fixed quote should name the pages, the integrations and the revision rounds. If it does not, the number will move.
The honest answer is that a business website costs somewhere between a few hundred dollars and several hundred thousand, which is useless to you. So here is the version we actually use when a business messages us: the ranges we quote, and the specific things that move a project from one range to the next.
We have shipped over 1,240 projects since 2016, mostly for businesses in the US, UK, Canada and Europe. The numbers below are what we charge, not an industry survey.
The four realistic price bands
| What you need | Typical range | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| One-page landing page for ads | $749 to $1,200 | 3 to 7 days |
| Small business marketing site, 5 to 10 pages | $1,200 to $2,500 | 1 to 3 weeks |
| E-commerce store | $2,500 to $6,000 | 3 to 6 weeks |
| Custom web application or SaaS | $4,999 and up | 4 to 12 weeks |
Most trade and service businesses land in the second row. That covers a home page, a page for each service you sell, an about page, a contact page with a working enquiry route, a gallery or review section, and the tracking that tells you which of those pages produced the phone call.
What actually moves the number
People assume page count drives cost. It rarely does. Ten service pages built from one template is a small amount of extra work. Here is what genuinely changes a quote:
- Custom functionality. A booking calendar that checks real availability, a quote calculator, a customer login, live stock from a supplier feed. Each one is a small software project sitting inside a website.
- Integrations. Stripe, a CRM, an accounting tool, a parts database. One integration is routine. Five integrations that have to agree with each other is a different project.
- Content. If you have photos, service descriptions and a logo, we are building. If we are writing your copy, art directing a photo shoot and rebuilding your brand, that is design and copywriting time on top.
- Migration. Moving 200 old blog posts with their URLs intact and redirects mapped is real work, and skipping it is how businesses lose their Google rankings during a redesign.
- Who maintains it. A site your team edits through a CMS costs more to build than one we edit for you, and less to run.
The question to ask any agency
Ask what happens if you need a change three weeks after launch. If the answer is vague, the low quote is not really the price. Ask for the revision rounds and the post-launch support terms in writing before you sign.
The costs nobody puts in the proposal
Building the site is a one-off. Running it is not. Budget for these separately so you are not surprised in month two:
- 1Domain. Roughly $10 to $20 a year. You should own it, in your name, on your account. Not the agency's.
- 2Hosting. $5 to $60 a month for most business sites. A custom application with a database costs more to run than a marketing site.
- 3Business email. Around $6 per user per month. Please stop using a gmail address on your quotes.
- 4Maintenance. Updates, backups, uptime monitoring and small changes. We charge from $99 a month. Skipping it is fine right up until the day it is not.
- 5Advertising. If you are buying Google or Meta traffic, the site is the cheap part of your budget. Which is exactly why a slow, badly built page is so expensive.
Cheap sites are not cheap
A $300 template site is genuinely fine for a business that just needs an address on the internet. It stops being fine the moment you spend money sending traffic to it. We rebuilt a landing page for NVX Performance, a UK vehicle security retailer. The old page loaded slowly and buried the enquiry form. After the rebuild, conversion went from 4% to 12% in A/B testing, and PageSpeed went from 28 to 97 on mobile.
Nothing about their traffic changed. The same visitors, the same ad spend, three times the enquiries. If you are spending anything on ads, the difference between a $749 page and a $2,000 page pays for itself in weeks.
How to get a quote you can trust
A quote worth comparing names four things: every page being built, every integration, how many revision rounds are included, and what happens after launch. Anything missing from that list is where the price will move later.
We quote a fixed price after a short call, and we do not bill hourly. If you want a number for your specific situation, message us on WhatsApp or book a free 15-minute call. You will get a plan and a price the same week, with no obligation.
Fakhar Zaman
Founder, Lipsum Technologies
Building websites and web applications since 2016, with a team in Islamabad and clients across the US, UK, Canada and Europe. Writes here about what actually moves the numbers on a business website.