How much does a website for a small business really cost?
Nobody can quote a firm price without knowing what the site has to do, which is why every answer online is a range. This guide explains what moves the number up and down, what the site costs after launch, and which questions separate a fair quote from an expensive surprise. Our own prices are in here too, with the market ranges next to them, so you can see where we sit.
Updated:
In short
- The build price is driven by four things: how many pages, whether the words already exist, whether anything has to be functional (booking, shop, login), and how many languages.
- The price you’re quoted isn’t the price you pay over three years. Domain, hosting, updates and edits are the parts people forget.
- A subscription builder is cheap to start and never stops charging. A built site costs more once, then costs very little to keep.
- Content is the most common reason a project runs late and over budget. Agree in writing who writes the words before work starts.
- Ask who owns the site and what happens if you leave. If the answer is complicated, that’s the answer.
- Soul Design’s own founding-client prices: €490 for a one-page site, €1,290 for a full small-business site, from €2,490 for custom work; €55–€349 a month afterwards if you want it looked after.
What makes one website cost €500 and another €5,000?
Four things decide the price of a small business website, in this order: how many distinct pages it has, whether the text and photos already exist, whether the site has to do something beyond informing, and how many languages it ships in. “Beyond informing” means bookings, payments or logins. Functionality and content move the number most; taste barely moves it at all.
Notice what doesn’t move the price of a small business website: the number of stock photos, the shade of the buttons, how many colour variants you were shown. Those consume hours, but they rarely change the size of a project. What changes it is whether a machine has to do something reliably for a stranger at two in the morning — a booking that must not double-sell a table, a payment that must not fail silently. That’s where cost lives, and where the risk lives too. That is the reason functional sites are priced on a different basis, not simply higher.
| Factor | Effect on the build price | Why |
|---|---|---|
| One page vs. a full site | Moderate increase | Each page is structure, copy, layout and testing — not just more scrolling |
| Copy and photos ready vs. not | Large increase | Writing and sourcing images is work in itself, and it’s where projects stall |
| Informational vs. functional | Largest increase | Bookings, payments, accounts and integrations bring testing, edge cases and liability |
| Each additional language | Moderate increase per language | A proper second language is a second set of texts to write and maintain, not a plugin |
| Design revisions | Little to none | Rounds of feedback cost time, not scope. Design decisions change the number; taste doesn’t |
What does a website cost over three years, not just on day one?
Over three years a website costs the build, plus a domain every year, plus hosting, plus whatever it takes to keep it current. For a small static business site the running costs are very small. For a site built inside a subscription platform, the monthly fee runs for as long as the site exists.
On our own numbers, a Soul Starter over three years looks like this: €490 once, plus about €10 a year for the domain, plus €0 for hosting inside a free tier. That comes to roughly €520 in total, and it is the whole bill if you maintain the site yourself. The same three years on a monthly subscription is whatever the fee is, multiplied by thirty-six, and at the end the site still isn’t yours. That is the entire argument, and it is arithmetic, not ideology: which one wins depends on how long you expect to need the site.
| Cost | How often | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Build or design fee | Once — or monthly, on a builder | The only number most quotes mention |
| Domain name | Every year | A .net bought at cost from a registrar that doesn’t mark up is roughly €10 a year; country domains such as .pl are usually a little more |
| Hosting | Monthly or yearly | A static business site fits inside the free tier most modern hosts offer, within their stated limits; heavy platforms need paid hosting |
| SSL certificate | Normally included | Free certificates are the industry standard. If someone bills separately for HTTPS in 2026, ask why |
| Updates and security | Ongoing | Platform-dependent: a static site has almost nothing to patch; a plugin-based site needs regular attention |
| Content edits | As needed | Included in a care plan, billed hourly, or done by you |
| Email on your domain | Monthly, sometimes free | Forwarding is often free; full mailboxes usually aren’t |
What are the realistic ways to get a website made?
There are four realistic ways to get a small business website made: build it yourself on a subscription platform, hire a freelancer, hire an agency, or work with a small studio. Each of them is right for someone. The mistake isn’t choosing the cheap option — it’s choosing one whose failure mode you can’t live with.
Build it yourself on a subscription platform
Cheapest to start and quickest to something visible. You pay monthly for as long as the site exists, and the site lives inside that platform. What you can take with you varies: export varies a lot — some platforms hand over code, others only text and images. Check the export documentation for the specific platform before you commit, not after. Right for testing an idea, a temporary page or a business where the website isn’t part of how customers decide.
Hire a freelancer
Usually the best price for genuine custom work, and you talk directly to the person doing it. The risk is continuity: illness, a new full-time job or simply going silent leaves you with a site nobody maintains. That risk is manageable if you own everything and the site is built simply enough for someone else to pick up. Ask about ownership and hand-over before you sign.
Hire an agency
You buy process, capacity and someone to call when the person who built it is on holiday. You also pay for the account manager, the project manager and the office. Right when the project is large, has hard deadlines and money attached, or when your own time is the scarcest resource in the room.
Work with a small studio
One person or a small team taking the project end to end: the writing, the design, the build, the launch and the maintenance afterwards. The trade-off is capacity, not capability — a studio this size takes fewer projects at a time, so start dates matter more. A studio can disappear too, and the response to that has to be structural, not reassuring. That means open technology, no proprietary lock-in, the domain and the code in your name, and ownership transferring on final payment, so that another developer can pick the site up instead of rebuilding it.
What does Soul Design charge, specifically?
Soul Design (soul-design.net) charges a fixed price per package, agreed before work starts and paid in stages: €490 for a one-page Soul Starter, €1,290 for the full Soul Business site, and from €2,490 for a custom Soul Signature build. Those are founding-client rates; the prices after the founding phase are €690, €1,900 and from €3,400.
After launch, care plans are optional and separate: €55 a month keeps the site hosted, backed up, secure and monitored, and €125 a month adds content edits and reporting. At €349 a month we treat the site as something that should be producing enquiries, with ongoing work on visibility and conversion. You can also take the site and maintain it yourself. It’s yours on final payment either way, and no part of the price is a subscription you can’t leave.
| Package | Founding-client price | Price after the founding phase | Typical market range we see | Live in |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Soul Starter — a focused one-page site | €490 | €690 | €1,500–2,500 | 3–5 business days |
| Soul Business — the full small-business website | €1,290 | €1,900 | €3,000–6,000 | 7–10 business days |
| Soul Signature — custom, built to grow | from €2,490 | from €3,400 | €8,000–20,000 | 2–3 weeks |
What should you ask before agreeing to anything?
Six questions, asked before you sign anything, surface almost every unpleasant surprise in this line of work. They take five minutes. A good supplier answers all six without hesitating, and hesitation is itself an answer you want early.
There’s a seventh question worth asking if the site matters commercially: ask how the site is meant to be found (search, AI assistants, ads or nothing in particular) and what’s included on that front. It’s the question that most often goes unasked, and a beautiful site nobody reaches is the most expensive kind there is. The answer also tells you a lot about who you’re dealing with, because “we’ll set up SEO” and “here’s what we do and what it won’t do” come from different kinds of supplier.
- 1 Who owns the website and the domain when it’s finished, and what exactly do I get if we part ways?
- 2 What’s included in this price, and what’s explicitly not? Ask for the second list in writing.
- 3 How many rounds of changes are included, and what happens on the round after that?
- 4 Who writes the words, and who supplies the photographs?
- 5 What does it cost to keep this running for a year: hosting, domain, updates and small edits?
- 6 What happens if I need a change in six months and you’re unavailable?
Is the cheapest option ever the right one?
The cheapest way to build a website is the right one more often than this industry likes to admit. If you’re testing whether a business idea has customers at all, a subscription builder or a single well-written page is the correct call. Spending €3,000 to discover nobody wants the thing is an expensive way to run an experiment.
There is a fairly clear point at which the cheap option stops being right: when the website starts to be how customers decide about you, not merely how they find your phone number. At that point the things a cheap site can’t do — being fast, being found, being yours, being changed quickly — start costing money you never see billed, and the saving turns into a tax. The signal is usually anecdotal before it’s measurable: someone says they nearly didn’t call because the site looked abandoned, and that’s the moment to stop optimising the monthly fee.
Everything you might be wondering.
- Are these prices with or without VAT?
- Whether tax is added depends on your status and ours, and on where your business is registered. The applicable treatment is stated on the quote and in the contract before you sign anything, so no invoice arrives with a number you haven’t already seen in writing.
- Why do quotes for the same website differ so much?
- Because they’re usually not for the same website. One quote assumes you supply the text; another includes writing it. One is a template with your logo; another is built around your content. One ends at launch; another includes a year of upkeep. Compare the exclusions, not the totals.
- Why are you cheaper than an agency — what’s the catch?
- Two reasons, both boring. There’s no office, no account manager and no project manager between you and the person building the site. And these are founding-client rates while we build the portfolio, which is why the price after the founding phase is listed next to them. The catch is capacity: fewer projects at a time, so start dates are the thing to check.
- I already have a website. Is a redesign cheaper than a new one?
- Sometimes, and it depends on what’s underneath. If the content is good and the platform is sound, reworking it is cheaper. If the site is built on something that can’t be exported or maintained, “redesign” is a rebuild in disguise, and paying to preserve the old structure costs more than starting cleanly. Ask for both prices.
- Is a one-page site enough for a small business?
- Often, yes — for a café, a studio, a single-service business where people need to know what you offer, where you are, and how to reach you. It stops being enough when different customers need different information, or when you want to be found for specific questions and not only by name.
- Do I have to pay everything up front?
- You shouldn’t have to. Staged payments as work is delivered protect both sides. At Soul Design you pay in stages, and full ownership transfers on final payment with no lock-in.
- What does website maintenance actually include?
- At minimum: hosting, SSL, backups, security updates and uptime monitoring — the things that keep a site online and safe. Higher tiers add content edits, monitoring of how the site is found, and reporting. If a maintenance offer doesn’t list what it covers, ask for the list before agreeing to it.
- Can I move my site somewhere else later?
- It depends on how it was built: open technology can be handed over and hosted anywhere; a subscription platform usually gives back much less — sometimes only the text. Ask for the export options at the start, not once you want to leave.
Read next
- Who owns your website — what “you will own the site” actually means in a contract, and how to check what you control today
- Website builder or a site built for you — what each platform lets you export, and when a builder is genuinely the better choice
Sources
- Soul Design — packages and care plans — Our own prices, as published on the site.
- Cloudflare Registrar — at-cost domain pricing ↗ — Registrars that sell domains at wholesale cost; the basis for the ~€10 a year figure.
- Cloudflare Pages — limits and free tier ↗ — The stated limits behind “a static site fits inside a free tier”.