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 — puts design at $2,000 to $5,000, inside a total range that runs from one thousand to numbers with a comma. 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.

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. Compare on the three-year total, in both currencies. Nothing else makes the options commensurable.
5. 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 three questions are for — they work on every seller in this market, and they work on us. Ask them wherever you go next.