This is the question every small firm asks first and almost no agency answers on its website. The honest reason is that the range is genuinely wide. The dishonest reason is that a vague number is easier to raise later. Here is the real picture, the things that actually move it, and what we charge, because an article about cost that hides its own prices is not an answer.
The four bands, and which one you are in
Published 2026 pricing research converges on four tiers. The gap between them is not polish. It is who is doing the work and how much of it is custom.
| Band | Price | What you get | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY template | Under $500 | A builder subscription and your own weekend | Pre-revenue, or a placeholder |
| Freelancer or small shop | $500 to $5,000 | A template configured for you, some custom design | A firm that needs to exist online and little else |
| Boutique agency | $5,000 to $25,000 | Custom design, custom build, integrations, content structure | Most established small firms |
| B2B redesign, typical | $32,000 to $48,000 | Research, a bespoke design system, conversion architecture, CRM integration | Firms where the site is a sales channel |
| Fully custom | $25,000+ | Applications, portals, heavy integration, large migrations | Firms where the site is the operation |
Most established small businesses land between $2,000 and $8,000. Once the site is a sales channel rather than a brochure, the number moves sharply: published 2026 research puts the majority of B2B website redesigns between $32,000 and $48,000. If a quote sits far below its band, ask what is being reused. If it sits far above, ask what is being built that the band does not include. Neither question is rude and both answers are informative.
Why page count is the worst way to price a website
Almost every quote you receive will be framed in pages, because pages are easy to count. They are also close to irrelevant. Twenty pages built from one template with different words is an afternoon. Six pages, one of which takes a payment and writes to a practice management system, is a fortnight.
What actually moves the number, roughly in order:
- How many systems it has to talk to. A CRM, a practice system, a payment provider, a booking tool. This is almost always the single biggest factor.
- Whether those systems have decent APIs. A modern one is hours. A legacy one with no API can be weeks, and sometimes the honest answer is that it cannot be done cleanly at all.
- Whether anyone logs in. A client portal or an application is a different kind of project from a website, and it should be quoted as one.
- Whether the content exists. Structuring what you have is quick. Writing it from nothing is a separate job, and the firm that owns the expertise has to be involved either way.
- How many URLs are migrating. A redirect map for forty pages and one for four thousand are not the same task.
- How fast you need it. Compressing a schedule costs money in every industry and anyone claiming otherwise is absorbing it somewhere you cannot see.
Speed is a revenue argument, not a technical one
Load time gets treated as a developer preoccupation. It is the clearest link between a website and money that anyone has measured.
Note the unit. That is a tenth of a second. Most small-firm websites are seconds behind a well-built one, not tenths, because a theme fighting a page builder fighting three plugins has to assemble itself in the browser before anyone sees anything. On the same traffic and the same ad spend, a faster site simply converts more of it.
The same structural work has a second payoff. A page that assembles itself in the browser is close to a blank document to a crawler that does not run JavaScript, and several of the AI assistants your clients now ask are in that category. Server-rendered HTML is one decision that serves both the buyer on a train and the machine deciding who to name.
The cost nobody quotes: the first year
Published guidance puts all-in first-year cost at roughly 1.5 to 2 times the quoted build, once hosting, maintenance, content and integrations are counted. Ongoing hosting, maintenance, security and analytics alone run $3,600 to $24,000 a year for a professional site.
This is where most of the unpleasant surprises live. Ask three questions before you sign: who hosts it, who patches it when a dependency has a security advisory, and who is responsible if it is down on a Monday morning. If the answer to any of them is "you", that is a real cost and it belongs in the comparison.
What we charge, since we are asking you to trust the rest
We publish every price, which is unusual enough in this market to be worth saying plainly. Websites run $3,000 to $18,000 in three sizes, and the sizes are contiguous: where one ends the next begins, so there is no gap for your project to fall into and no ambiguity about which one you are in.
| Size | Price | Typical timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Small | $3,000 to $7,500 | two to three weeks |
| Medium | $7,500 to $18,000 | four to eight weeks |
| Large | from $18,000 | quoted after a paid scoping week |
That comes in under the boutique agency band rather than sitting inside it, and there are two honest reasons rather than one flattering one. Our overheads are a fraction of a London or New York agency’s because the studio runs from Chiang Mai. And we have no client case studies yet, so we are not charging you for the certainty a portfolio and a reference list buy. What you get instead is that the person who quotes the work writes the code. Judge that on the site you are reading, which is built the way yours would be.
How to compare quotes without being an engineer
Ask for the number before the discovery call
Any agency can give you a band from a two-line description. A refusal to name one until you have sat through a presentation is a pricing strategy aimed at you rather than at the work.
Ask who owns the code and the accounts
If leaving means rebuilding, you are not buying a website, you are renting one. Get the answer in writing.
Ask what happens to your existing URLs
A redirect map built from real traffic data protects the pages that already earn you something. "We will sort that out at the end" has cost firms years of accumulated search equity.
Ask to see something they built, then test it
Open it on a phone on a bad connection. Run it through any free speed or crawler check. A portfolio screenshot tells you nothing that the live site will not tell you in ten seconds.
Ask what is not included
Content, photography, hosting, maintenance, integrations and post-launch changes are the five things most commonly outside a headline price. Getting them listed turns two quotes into a real comparison.
The short version
Expect $2,000 to $8,000 for a good small business website, more if people log in or systems have to talk to each other, and budget 1.5 to 2 times that for the first year. Price it against what it is supposed to earn rather than what it contains, and treat any agency that will not name a range as having answered the question.
