Nobody publishes this number, which is why you are reading a fourth article about it. So: a custom, hand-coded website costs $2,500 to $4,500 for most small businesses and law firms. Hosting is $150 a year. Optional maintenance starts at $299 a month.
That is our pricing, published, not a range designed to get you on a call. What follows is what actually moves the number, and where the cheaper options genuinely beat us.
The four price tiers, honestly
$0–$50/month — website builders
Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy. You do the work. Genuinely fine for a single page with your hours and phone number, and we will tell you so rather than sell against it. The costs show up later: you cannot change what the platform will not let you change, and the site is rented, not owned.
$500–$1,500 — freelancer on a template
A person installs a theme and fills it with your content. Faster and cheaper, and the result is only as good as the theme. The common failure is that it looks identical to three competitors who bought the same one.
$2,500–$4,500 — custom build
Where we sit. Every page designed around your business and written from scratch. No theme to fight, no plugin to break, and the structure can be built around how people actually search for what you do.
$10,000+ — agency
A team, a strategist, a project manager, and an office to pay for. Sometimes worth it. Often you are buying the overhead.
What actually changes the price
Four things, in order of impact:
- Page count. A five-page site is not half the work of a ten-page site, but it is not the same either. For law firms this is usually practice areas — each one needs its own real page.
- Functionality. Booking, payments, client logins, intake forms that route somewhere specific. A brochure site and a site that does something are different projects.
- Content. If you have copy, we build. If you do not, we write it — that is real work and it is the stage that most often slips.
- Migration. Moving an existing site means mapping every old URL so you do not lose the rankings you already have. See website redesign for why that matters more than the design.
The costs people forget
The build is not the whole number. Budget for:
- Domain — $12–$20/year, and you should own it, not your developer.
- Hosting — $150/year with us.
- Maintenance — optional, $299/month and up. Updates, monitoring, backups, support. If you skip it, the site keeps working; you are just on your own.
- SEO — a separate ongoing discipline. A well-built site can be found. Being found first is ongoing work.
A decision framework
Spend the money on custom when at least two of these are true:
- One customer is worth more than the build cost.
- You compete on search, and your competitors all use the same theme.
- The site has a job beyond existing — booking, intake, payments.
- You are losing mobile visitors to load time today.
- You want to own the asset rather than rent it indefinitely.
If none of those are true, buy a $16/month builder subscription and spend the difference on something that grows the business faster. That advice costs us work and it is still the right advice.
Why we publish the number
Quoting "it depends" is a way of finding out what you will pay before saying what it costs. You can see our prices without talking to anyone, and if the range does not fit, you have lost nothing but a minute.