The short answer
There are four ways to get a website, and they cost very different amounts:
| Route | Typical cost | What you are really paying for |
|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself | ~$15–$50/mo | A template and a subscription. Your own time is the real cost, and it is not small. |
| An independent builder — which is what we are |
~$500–$3,000 | One person, building it themselves, working with you directly. No overhead to carry, so more of what you pay goes into the site. |
| Agency | ~$5,000–$25,000+ | A team — which includes the account manager and the salesperson who sold it to you. |
Those are general market ranges rather than quotes, and builder plans change often — check current pricing before relying on a number. Ours are exact and are below.
The independent range is wide, and it is worth being straight about why: it depends entirely on the person. Some build from scratch, some drop you into a template and charge the same. The label does not tell you which — the work does. Ask to see real sites they have built, and ask what happens after launch. Those two questions separate the range far better than the price does.
We are an independent one-person studio and we would rather say so plainly than dress it up as something larger. It is the reason the price is what it is, and it is the reason you talk to the person actually building your site instead of someone relaying messages. The work is here — judge it on that.
Why the spread is so wide
Because "a website" describes two genuinely different products, and the word does not distinguish between them.
- Pages are cheap. Text, photos, a contact form. Adding a fifth page to a four-page site is a small job.
- Anything that does something is software. Stores data, has logins, calculates a price, takes a booking, lets staff update stock. That is not a page, and it is where the money goes.
This is why quotes that look wildly inconsistent often are not. One person quoted for pages and the other quoted for software.
A useful question to ask any quote: "which parts of this are pages, and which parts are software?" Anyone who cannot answer that clearly has not thought about your project yet.
The cost nobody puts in the quote
A build price is not the price of having a website. Every site has running costs:
- A domain name — roughly $12–$20 a year, forever.
- Hosting and an SSL certificate — the thing that makes the padlock appear.
- Monitoring — because a site that has been down for nine days is worse than no site, and nobody notices on their own.
- Edits — the one that catches people. New hours, a new member of staff, a price change. If every small edit is billable or requires an email and a wait, they stop happening, and within a year the site is quietly wrong.
Ask specifically about that last one before signing anything.
Our pricing, in full
Published, because "contact us for a quote" mostly exists so the price can be adjusted to what you look like you can pay.
| Plan | One-time | Monthly | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $499 | $59 | One-page long-scroll site, mobile-first, with a lead-capture form. |
| Business | $999 | $59 | Five pages plus one interactive tool — a quote calculator, product finder or booking form. |
| Pro | $1,499 | $59 | Eight to ten pages plus an advanced tool with a staff back office and live data. |
The $59 a month is the same on every plan and covers hosting, SSL, domain management, security and uptime monitoring, upkeep of your custom tool, and around 30 minutes of content edits each month. Larger changes are $75 an hour, quoted up front. There is a 12-month term, after which it continues month to month.
So what does the first year actually cost?
The number people want and rarely get. One-time price plus twelve months:
| Plan | Build | 12 months | First-year total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $499 | $708 | $1,207 |
| Business | $999 | $708 | $1,707 |
| Pro | $1,499 | $708 | $2,207 |
Add-ons, if you need them: an extra custom tool is $400 plus $20 a month, extra pages are $100 each, and upgrading a Business tool to a full back-office app is $500. Logo, branding and product photography are quoted separately.
When you should not pay for a custom site
Genuinely — there are cases where a builder is the right call and we will tell you so:
- You need a few pages of information that rarely change, and someone will keep them current.
- You are testing whether a business idea works at all. Spend the money on finding customers.
- Your customers are entirely on one platform already and a website would be a formality.
A builder becomes the wrong answer when you need something it will not do, when the workarounds have turned into a stack of paid add-ons, or when you realise the monthly fee is renting something you can never own. That is exactly what happened to Eastern Automotive Tint.
Common questions
Do I own my website?
With a custom build, yes — it is built for your business and it belongs to you. With a page builder you are renting: stop paying and it goes away, because it cannot exist outside that platform. That difference does not matter at all until the day it matters enormously.
How long does it take?
A one-page site is quick. Anything with a custom tool depends mostly on how fast decisions and content come back from you, which is usually the real bottleneck rather than the building.
What if I do not know which plan I need?
Describe what you want the site to do rather than how many pages you think it should have, and the plan follows from that. If a spreadsheet is currently doing the job, that is usually a sign you need a tool rather than more pages — this is what that looks like built out.
Is there really a free mockup?
Yes, and it is a mockup of your actual business, not a generic template with your name on it. If you do not like it, you have lost nothing and you keep it.
Prices on this page are current as of September 2026 and mirror the pricing section on the homepage. Market ranges for other routes are general figures, not quotes.