A website has two prices: money and evenings. Every seller hides one.

Ask what a website costs and you will always get a number, and the number will always be true — for the person saying it. The site-builder ad says eighteen dollars a month, and it is right. The agency blog says a real site starts at five thousand, and it is right too. Each of them is quoting the half of the price they happen to sell and leaving you to discover the other half in your own calendar.

So this piece prices the whole thing, in both currencies at once: money, and evenings. You already price your own work this way — no fence was ever quoted as “free, I’ll just do it Sundays, eventually” — and the discipline transfers exactly.

The two currencies

One rule makes every comparison below honest: your evenings have a price, and you already know it — it is your own hourly rate, the one that keeps the business alive. If you have never pinned that number down, work it out first; every calculation here leans on it. An evening of yours is not free just because nobody invoices you for it.

The builder: eighteen dollars and your Tuesdays

The cash side is real and genuinely small: Wix’s cheapest ad-free plan was $17.77 a month billed yearly when we read their pricing page — call it a bit over two hundred a year, first-year domain included. For a simple, well-kept site, a builder is not a scam; it is a legitimate tool, and pretending otherwise would be the agency’s half-truth.

The evening side is the half the ad does not price. Assume — and this is an assumption, so swap in your own honesty — twenty-five hours to get from a blank template to something you would put your name on: words written, photos found, hours and services laid out, the thing made to work on a phone. At a thirty-five-dollar rate those Tuesdays cost $875 — the two-hundred-dollar first year has quietly become a thousand-dollar one. And the subscription is the gym-membership kind: the eighteen dollars runs forever, and so do the evenings, because a site is never “done” — hours change, photos age, the winter promotion needs taking down in March. The builder is cheapest for the owner whose evenings are worth little and who enjoys the fiddling. That owner exists. Most are not him.

The freelancer and the agency: the number, then March

Hiring it out flips the bars: the cash is bigger, the evenings mostly vanish. For a small business, WebFX — an agency, so read the source label — prices basic design at $2,000 to $5,000 on its own price sheet, and its longer guide stretches design to $15,000 and whole projects from $1,000 to $48,000. The spread is the honest part: it depends on what you ask for, and on who is asking. Freelancers generally land under agencies for the same scope; we found no published range solid enough to be worth citing, which is itself worth knowing — that market prices person by person.

But the sticker is not the real question. The real question is month seven, and it is one sentence long: the site is live, the invoice is paid, and your Saturday hours change — who edits the page, how fast, for how much? Projects end; websites do not. The answer to the month-seven question — a retainer, an hourly rate, a shrug, an unanswered email — is the difference between a price and a down payment, and it is knowable in advance if you ask it out loud before signing anything.

The second year: what the first price leaves out

Every option above has a second-year bill, and it is the same four lines whoever built the site. The domain: a .com costs the registry $10.26 a year wholesale, rising to $10.97 on 1 November 2026, and every registrar adds its margin on top — so ten to twenty dollars a year, forever, in your name (more on that name below). The builder’s “free domain” is a voucher for year one; Wix says so plainly: renew it, and you pay. Hosting: inside a builder plan it is part of the subscription; with a hired build it is a separate line, WebFX puts it at ten dollars a month and up, and the question is who holds the account. The certificate — the padlock — is free from Let’s Encrypt, a nonprofit, and every decent host installs it automatically; anyone charging you for the padlock is charging for a free thing. And mail on your own name (you@yourfence.com instead of a gmail address) is a separate subscription per mailbox that nobody puts in the website quote and everybody needs.

Put together, the second year of a “$18 website” is not $213 and the second year of a “$3,500 website” is not zero. Here is the arithmetic for one owner over three years — with every assumption printed, so you can cross out ours and write in yours.

Read the last line, not the first. The builder is still the cheapest, but against the freelancer by about eight hundred dollars over three years rather than by two thousand in cash alone — and only if the owner’s evenings are really worth thirty-five dollars and he really does the eight hours a year. Raise the rate to sixty and the builder and the freelancer meet. That is not an argument for either; it is the reason the comparison has to be done in both currencies before it means anything.

Who owns it — the exit test

There is a cost that appears on no quote and is the largest one on the page: the site you cannot leave. It shows up in three places. The domain — is it registered in your business’s name, with your email on the account, or in the freelancer’s, “for convenience”? The logins — do you hold the administrator access to the site and to the hosting, or does he? And the site itself — can it be moved? Most builders keep the site on their platform — Wix says it in its own help pages: the site must run on Wix’s servers — so you can take your domain and your words with you, but not the site, and leaving means building again. None of this is sinister. It is simply never mentioned, because nobody plans to part ways on the day they sign.

The cost of getting it wrong is easy to price, because it is a rebuild. A domain in somebody else’s name is his to renew or to forget; when it lapses, the address on your van, your invoices and your Google listing points at nothing, and you start from zero with the whole first table above — plus the calls that went to a dead page while you found out. A site you cannot edit is the slower version of the same loss: hours change in March, the page says otherwise until somebody answers an email, and the customer who read the wrong hours does not call twice.

The exit test is one sentence, asked before any money moves: “If we parted ways tomorrow, what exactly do I keep — the domain in my name, the logins, and the site?” The good answer is “all three, and here is how.” A pause is information. So is “the domain is easier if we hold it” — it is easier, for them.

Buying the right size

The last way to overpay is dimensional: buying a twelve-page site for a five-page business. A trade site earns its keep with a handful of jobs — say who you are and where, show real work, name the services in plain lines, make the phone number work, and give the visitor a reason to believe the call gets answered. That is a small, sharp thing, not a cathedral. What those pages have to actually say, gate by gate, is its own piece — the point here is only that when an offer’s page count grows, ask which of those jobs the extra pages do. “None, but it looks fuller” is an answer you pay for twice: once in cash, once in the upkeep of pages nobody reads.

The short of it

1. Every published answer to this question is written by someone selling one of the answers. Including this one — see below.
2. Builders: a bit over $200 a year in cash, plus setup and upkeep evenings that never fully end. Price the evenings at your own rate.
3. Hired builds: $2,000–$5,000 is a documented small-business range. The sticker matters less than the month-seven answer.
4. The second year has the same four lines for everyone: domain, hosting, certificate, mail. Only the certificate is free; the “free domain” is a voucher for year one.
5. Compare on the three-year total, in both currencies. Nothing else makes the options commensurable — the table above is one way to do it.
6. Ask the exit question before the first payment: domain in your name, logins in your hands, a site you can move. A rebuild is the most expensive line on this page, and it is on no quote.
7. Buy the five-page size. Extra pages cost twice.

And the disclosure the other cost guides skip: we build websites for a living, so read our bias into this piece the way you should read the builder’s into its ad and the agency’s into its blog. That is exactly what the four questions are for — they work on every seller in this market, and they work on us. Ask them wherever you go next.