How much does a website cost? Ask that online and you get two kinds of answer. Website builders tell you it costs $16 a month. Agencies tell you it costs $8,000. Both are telling the truth about their own product and neither is answering your question.
The honest answer is that a website has three costs: what you pay to build it, what you pay to keep it running, and what it costs you when it does not work. The third one is invisible on every pricing page and it is usually the biggest.
Here is the full picture, including the parts that are awkward for us to admit.
The four ways to get a website
| Option | Up front | Ongoing | Your time |
|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy |
$0 | $16 to $49/mo | 10 to 30 hours to build, then ongoing |
| Freelancer | $1,500 to $8,000 | $0 to $200/mo | Several hours of back and forth |
| Agency | $6,000 to $25,000 | $200 to $500/mo | Weeks of meetings and revisions |
| Managed subscription | $0 to $500 | $47 to $200/mo | Close to none |
Those numbers are roughly accurate and almost completely useless on their own, because they price the wrong thing. What matters is not the monthly fee. It is whether the site ends up finished, current, and actually catching the people who find it.
Where the DIY math breaks
A $16 a month builder is genuinely the cheapest option, and for some businesses it is the right one. If you enjoy this kind of thing, have a free weekend, and only need a few pages that say who you are and how to reach you, stop reading and go build it. You will save real money.
The problem is not the software. Modern builders are good. The problem is that a website is not a project you finish, it is a thing you maintain, and the person maintaining it is you.
The pattern is remarkably consistent. Someone signs up on a Sunday, builds four pages, gets to the part where they need to write the services copy, and stops. Six weeks later the site is still half done. A year later they are still paying $16 a month for it.
The other version: the site does launch, looks decent, and then never changes again. Prices go up, services change, the hours are wrong, and the phone number on it is the old one. It quietly becomes inaccurate.
If you are running a service business, the real cost of DIY is rarely the subscription. It is the ten to thirty hours it takes to build, and the fact that those hours are the same hours you would otherwise spend on jobs that pay.
What the builder price does not include
- A domain, once the first year promotion ends, usually $20 to $40 a year
- Removing the builder's own branding, which is often a plan tier up
- Anywhere for leads to actually go, other than an email inbox
- Someone to call when something breaks
- The copy. Every builder gives you a layout. None of them write your services page.
Where the freelancer and agency math breaks
Paying someone $2,500 to build it solves the "I will never finish this" problem, and a good freelancer will produce something better looking than you would have. This is a completely reasonable thing to do.
The catch is what happens on day 91. The build is done, the invoice is paid, and the relationship is over. Then in March you change your service area, and you email them, and either they have moved on, or it is $150 an hour, or you wait nine days for a two minute change.
So the site freezes. Not because anyone did anything wrong. The project simply ended, and websites do not.
Agencies solve that with a retainer, which is why agency maintenance runs $200 to $500 a month on top of a five figure build. That is a real service and for a business of a certain size it is worth it. For a two truck operation it is not.
The three costs nobody puts on the pricing page
These are the ones that decide whether a website was worth the money, and none of them appear in a comparison chart.
The hours you spend building it
Ten to thirty hours is the honest range for a first time build, and it is not evenly spread. Most of it goes on writing copy and picking photos, not on layout. If your time is worth $60 an hour on a job site, a "free" build costs more than five years of a managed plan.
The leads that go nowhere
Most small business sites have a contact form that sends an email. Emails get missed, buried, or land in spam. A lead you never saw costs you a whole job, and you will never know it happened. That single missed job usually exceeds a year of hosting.
The drift
Prices change, you add a service, you drop one, the hours shift for winter. A site that is eighteen months out of date is not neutral, it actively misinforms the people deciding whether to call you. This is the most common failure and the least discussed.
So which one should you pick?
It comes down to one question, and it is not about budget.
Build it yourself if
- You have a free weekend and do not mind the work
- You need something simple and mostly static
- You are comfortable writing your own copy
- You will genuinely go back and update it
Pay someone if
- Every hour you spend on this is an hour off a paying job
- You have started a site before and never finished it
- You want enquiries to reach you, not sit in an inbox
- You want changes handled without becoming a project
If you are in the left column, a builder at $16 a month is the correct answer and you should go use one. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
If you are in the right column, the thing you are actually buying is not a website. It is not having to think about the website.
What a managed plan costs, and what it should include
Managed subscriptions generally run $47 to $200 a month. At the low end you are getting hosting and a site somebody else keeps alive. At the higher end it should include the parts that make the site earn its keep.
If you are comparing managed options, these are the questions worth asking:
- Is there a setup fee, and is it refundable? Some are $500 to $2,000 before month one.
- Do you own the domain? If they own it, leaving gets complicated.
- How fast are changes, and who makes them? "Submit a ticket" and "text a person and it is done" are very different products at similar prices. Ask where the support desk is and what hours it keeps.
- Where do enquiries go? An email notification is the bare minimum. A place to actually track them is better.
- Is there a contract? Month to month means they have to keep earning it.
That last one matters more than people expect. A monthly plan with no lock in puts the pressure on the provider rather than on you, which is roughly the opposite of how the traditional model works.
What $47 a month actually gets you
This is the part most comparisons skip. The site is the front door. What decides whether it earns its keep is what sits behind it, and who picks up the phone when something needs changing.
The website, built for you
Your photos, your services, your prices, written and laid out by us. Your own domain on it. You do not open an editor, you do not write the services page, and you do not spend a weekend on it.
Every enquiry saved, not emailed
The form feeds a CRM, so enquiries are recorded with a name, a number and what they asked for. You get told the moment one lands, by email, by text, or on Telegram, up to 50 texts a month. Nothing sits in a spam folder.
You text us, we change it
8 changes a month is included. Prices went up, you added a service, the winter hours are different: you text it and we do it. No ticket queue, no editor, no waiting nine days for a freelancer to reply.
The support is the actual product. Every builder on the market will sell you software and leave you to run it. When something breaks at 7pm on a Friday you get a help centre article, a chat queue, or a support desk in a time zone that is asleep. We are in Tampa, you have our number, and you text a person.
That is the difference between a website you own and a website you are responsible for.
Basic analytics are included so you can see what people looked at. There is no long term contract, no setup fee, and cancelling stops the next payment.
Our work
Example sites we've built
Live, clickable examples of what your site could look like. Hover to pause, click to open. See all examples →
Sutil Pressure Washing
Clear Key Realty
Insurance advisor
Real estate, en español
Apex Mobile Detail
Bayside Family Dental
Voltline Electric
Ironclad Floor Coatings
Overhead Pro Garage Doors
Bayline Air & Heat
Harbor Point Insurance
Clearway Junk Removal
Reyes & Marlow Injury Attorneys
Evergreen Lawn & Landscape
Lumen Aesthetics
TrueHue Painters
Green Shield Pest Control
Mainline Plumbing Co.
Crystal Clear Pool Service
Gulf Coast Exterior Wash
Cornerstone Kitchen & Bath
RapidDry Restoration
Summit Ridge Roofing
Servicios del Sol
We build your site first. You decide after.
Tell us your business name and what you do. We build your real website, your photos, your services, your prices, and send you a live link, usually within the hour. If you want to keep it, it is $47/month. If not, there is no charge and we take it down.
Already sure? Start now and skip the preview. We still build it for you the same day.
No setup fee. No contract. Website, your own domain, CRM, lead alerts and 8 changes a month included. You text a person in Tampa, not a ticket queue. Se habla español.
The short version
A website costs $16 a month if your time is free, $2,500 once if you want someone else to build it and then never touch it again, and $47 to $200 a month if you want it handled permanently.
The cheapest option on paper is genuinely the cheapest option for some businesses. For most owner operators, the site that gets built in a weekend and abandoned by Thursday is the most expensive one of all, because it costs the subscription, the hours, and every customer who looked at it and called someone else.
Work out which column you are in. Then pick accordingly.
About the prices on this page. Figures quoted for freelancers, studios, agencies and website builders describe what those companies charge. They are not LeedAgent prices and should not be attributed to LeedAgent. LeedAgent charges $47 to $597 a month depending on plan, with no build fee, no setup fee and no discovery call fee, and builds the site before you pay anything.