The honest breakdown from a designer who’s seen every version of this conversation.
Everyone wants a number.
That’s fair. You’re a business owner, not a web design researcher. You just want to know if this is going to cost you $500 or $5,000 or something that makes you close the tab and never think about it again.
Here’s the problem: the honest answer is “it depends,” but not for the reason most designers hide behind that phrase. It depends because there are genuinely different things being sold under the same label. A website can mean a Squarespace page you built yourself at 11pm on a Sunday. It can also mean a fully custom-built, SEO-optimized, conversion-focused site that someone spent 10 weeks building for your specific business.
Those are not the same product. They should not cost the same amount. And understanding the difference is what this post is actually about.
So let’s go through the real ranges, what you get at each level, and how to figure out which one is right where your business is right now.
The Big Picture: What You’re Really Choosing Between
When small business owners start researching website costs, they usually find three buckets:
- DIY website builders (Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, WordPress.com)
- Freelancers and small studios (like Brick House Design)
- Agencies (larger teams, often project managers between you and the designer)
Each has a legitimate use case. Each comes with real tradeoffs. And none of them is automatically the right choice. The right choice depends on where your business is, what you need the site to do, and how much of your own time you’re willing to trade for a lower price tag.
Option 1: DIY Website Builders
Cost range: $0 to $50/month (plus your time)
Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, and their friends are real tools. They’re not scams. For a business that needs a simple online presence while they figure out their direction, they can work.
But here’s what nobody tells you when you sign up:
- You’re not just paying the monthly fee. You’re paying with your time, and your time has a dollar value.
- You’re working inside template constraints. The site looks like the template. Every other business using that template looks like your business.
- SEO on these platforms is limited. You can do the basics, but you’re fighting with one hand tied behind your back.
- When you outgrow it, you start over. Nothing transfers.
If you’re pre-revenue or just testing a business idea, DIY is a reasonable starting point. If you’ve been in business for a year or more and you’re still on a template builder, that site is probably costing you clients you don’t even know you’re losing.
The clients who were on the fence? They Googled you, saw a site that looked like a site, not a business, and booked someone else.
Option 2: Freelancers and Small Studios
Cost range: $500 to $10,000+ depending on scope and experience
This is the widest range in the whole conversation, and it’s where most small business owners get confused or burned.
$500 and $8,000 can both come from “a freelancer.” The difference is experience, process, strategy, and what actually gets built.
Here’s how to think about the tiers within this range:
$500 to $1,500: Entry-level freelancers or semi-custom template work
At this range, you’re typically getting a newer designer building on a template or a pre-built theme. The work can be good. But there’s usually limited strategy involved, minimal SEO setup, and you’ll be doing a lot of the content and direction yourself.
This is also where semi-custom website design lives, done right. At Brick House Design, the semi-custom packages (The Entryway at $1,050, The Residence at $2,250, and The Estate at $3,500) are template-based but professionally designed and strategically built. They’re not DIY. You don’t touch a single line of code. A designer handles everything with real intent behind every decision.
The difference between a $1,050 semi-custom site and a $500 DIY site is not the price. It’s that one of them actually has a strategy behind it.
$2,500 to $5,000: Experienced freelancers, semi-custom to entry-level custom
At this range, you start getting designers with a real process. Strategy conversations. Competitor research. A plan for how the site converts, not just how it looks.
This is also where custom website design starts. Brick House Design’s custom work starts at $4,700 with The Foundation package. For that, you’re getting a fully custom site built from scratch on WordPress and Elementor, with strategy, SEO research, competitor analysis, design, development, and 30 days of post-launch support. No template. No limitations from someone else’s design decisions.
$5,000 to $10,000+: Custom work from experienced designers
The Foundation ($4,700) covers most small businesses well. If your business is more complex, has multiple service lines, needs more pages, or requires deeper SEO work, The Starter ($6,500) or The Dream ($8,700) make more sense.
These aren’t “the same thing with more pages.” They’re different scopes with different strategic depth. More research. More pages. More revision rounds. More time spent on getting it right.
The businesses investing at this level understand that the site is infrastructure, not a line item. They’re not paying for a pretty page. They’re paying for a system that works while they sleep.
Option 3: Agencies
Cost range: $10,000 to $50,000+
Full-service agencies have teams. Project managers, dedicated designers, dedicated developers, SEO specialists. For a business at a certain scale, that makes sense.
For most local small businesses? It’s probably more than you need and more than makes sense to spend right now. The overhead of agency infrastructure is baked into the price.
If you’re a restaurant, salon, brewery, studio, or service business in the early-to-mid stages of growth, you’re not the agency’s target client. And that’s fine. There are better options for where you are.
So What Does a Website Actually Cost? The Real Numbers.
Here’s the honest breakdown:
- DIY builder: $0 to $600/year. Plus your time, which is not free.
- Semi-custom (done-for-you, template-based): $1,050 to $3,500. Brick House Design’s Entryway, Residence, and Estate packages live here.
- Custom from scratch (experienced designer): $4,700 to $8,700. Brick House Design’s Foundation, Starter, and Dream packages.
- Agency: $10,000 to $50,000+. For businesses that need a full team and have the volume to justify it.
Those numbers probably feel far apart. They should. They’re different products.
What Actually Drives the Price Up
This is the part most pricing breakdowns skip. Here’s what you’re actually paying for as the price goes up:
- Strategy: What is this site supposed to do? Who is it for? What should they do when they land on it? Cheaper sites skip this. Strategic sites start here.
- SEO research: What are people actually searching for? What are your competitors ranking for? How do we build pages that show up? This takes real time and expertise.
- Custom design: Built for your brand, your audience, your market. Not a template that 10,000 other businesses are using.
- Conversion focus: Pretty is not enough. The site needs to move people from “I found this” to “I’m booking.” That’s a different skill than making something look nice.
- Post-launch support: What happens when something breaks? Custom work from a designer who knows your site means you have someone to call.
The $500 site might look fine on a phone. The $5,000 site is built to actually work.
The Question Nobody Wants to Ask Out Loud
“Can I just do the cheap thing for now and upgrade later?”
Yes. And sometimes that’s the right call. If your business is brand new and you’re still figuring out your offer and your market, starting with something simple and inexpensive makes sense.
But here’s the honest truth about “I’ll upgrade later”:
Most businesses don’t upgrade. They live on the thing that was “temporary” for two, three, four years. And every year they spend on a site that doesn’t convert is a year of clients they didn’t get, visibility they didn’t build, and trust they didn’t earn.
The cost of a bad website isn’t just the price you paid for it. It’s the revenue it didn’t generate.
How to Know Which Option Is Right for You
Ask yourself these questions:
- How established is my business? A brand-new business and a 3-year business have different needs.
- What am I trying to get out of the site? Calls? Bookings? E-commerce? Awareness? The goal shapes the build.
- How much of my own time am I willing to put in? DIY is “free” but it costs time. Done-for-you costs money but gives you time back.
- What does my competition look like online? If every other business in your area has a professional site, showing up with a Wix page is a credibility problem.
- How long am I planning to be in this business? If the answer is “a long time,” a real website is infrastructure, not an expense.
If you’re a service business that’s been around for a year or more, has a real client base, and is serious about growing, the semi-custom or custom tier is almost certainly the right answer. The question is just which one.
A Note on “I Found Someone Who’ll Do It for $300”
This comes up. Someone always has a cousin or a friend of a friend or found someone on a freelancing platform who will build a whole website for $300.
Here’s the thing: those sites exist. And sometimes they’re even fine, for a very simple use case.
But more often, what you get is a site built fast, without strategy, without SEO setup, without real thought about your business. And six months later you’re paying again to have it rebuilt by someone who actually knows what they’re doing.
You pay twice. The second time, you know what you’re paying for.
This isn’t me talking down to anyone who’s been there. It’s just the pattern. And if I can save you the first bad investment by being honest about it upfront, that’s the whole point.
What Brick House Design Costs and What You Get
Since you’re here and asking real questions, here’s the straightforward breakdown for Brick House Design:
Semi-Custom Website Design
- The Entryway: $1,050 | 2 to 4 week timeline
- The Residence: $2,250 | 2 to 4 week timeline
- The Estate: $3,500 | 2 to 4 week timeline
All three are done-for-you, professionally designed, and strategically built. Not DIY. Not a template you click through yourself. A finished site, ready to go.
Custom Website Design
- The Foundation: $4,700 | 8 to 10 week timeline
- The Starter: $6,500 | 8 to 10 week timeline
- The Dream: $8,700 | 8 to 10 week timeline
Custom means custom. Built from scratch on WordPress and Elementor. Strategy, SEO research, competitor analysis, design, development, revisions, and 30 days of post-launch support included. No templates. No limitations from someone else’s design choices.
The Bottom Line
Websites cost anywhere from almost nothing to tens of thousands of dollars. But the real question was never “how much does a website cost.” The real question is what kind of website your business actually needs right now, and what it’s costing you to not have it.
The businesses in your area who are booked out, who have the waitlists, who people drive past three other options to get to? They didn’t get there by accident and they didn’t get there with a $300 website.
They looked like the obvious choice. And they invested in looking that way.
If you’re ready to figure out which option makes sense for where you are right now, the discovery call is free. Let’s talk about what your business actually needs.
Book a discovery call at brickhousedesign.co
