Websites9 min
How much does a website cost in 2026? Real price bands, and what moves them
How much does a website cost in 2026? DIY, freelancer, agency and custom price bands, what we charge (1 900 € HT, 2 to 4 weeks), and the hidden costs.
In February 2025 a charter broker on the Vieux-Port in Marseille forwarded me three quotes. Most of her clients are American, so she'd been reading American blogs, and her email had one line on top: how much does a website cost, really, and which of these three is lying? Her nephew would set her up on Squarespace for the price of the plan, $29 a month. A freelancer in Lisbon wanted €4,200. An agency in London wanted £19,000 (about $24,000) for six pages and something it called a "brand platform."
Nobody was lying. I think that disappointed her a little. What I told her is what I tell anyone who asks. If you build it yourself on Wix or Squarespace, a business website costs nothing up front and up to $160 a month. A freelancer will charge roughly $3,000 to $10,000. An agency, $5,000 to $30,000. And the minute the site has to run part of your business (client logins, a database, your own software) you're past $10,000 no matter who builds it. My studio builds a site from a blank page for 1 900 € HT (before VAT), around $2,200, and it takes two to four weeks.
How much does a website cost: four price bands
Search that question and WebFX alone will tell you anywhere from $10 to over $100,000. Those numbers aren't wrong. They're just answering different questions, because the three quotes she had weren't three levels of the same product. Each one was a different way of paying for a website.
The nephew option is a subscription plus free labor. Squarespace charges $19 a month for Basic and $99 for Advanced if you pay annually ($25 and $139 month to month), and Wix in the US goes from $17.77 to $159.77 a month, billed yearly. The labor is free the first time. After that you're asking for favors.
Freelancers are paid by the day, and you can estimate their rate from salaries. A web developer in the US earns a median $92,650 a year according to the BLS (May 2025 data), roughly $45 an hour, and a freelancer has to bill about double or triple that to make the same living. For a project of 5 to 10 days that comes out between about $3,600 and $10,800. WebFX gives a wider range, $500 to $10,000 and up, and the €4,200 quote from Lisbon fits in both.
With an agency you pay for several people instead of one. There's a project manager, sometimes a strategist, a designer and a developer, and the project waits in line behind their other clients. WebFX says agency web design runs $3,000 to $30,000 and up, and the agency quotes clients have forwarded to me over the last three years ran from about €4,200 up to the London one, roughly €23,000.
The fourth option is custom development. Once a site needs client accounts, its own database or a connection to your own software, I'd call it a web application rather than a website, and I quote it as one, starting at 9 000 € HT.
Why are the published averages all over the place? Mostly because they mix rented sites with built ones. In Clutch's 2025 survey of small businesses, 83% had a website (64% in 2018), and of the sites launched in the previous year 41% were on DIY builders like Wix and Squarespace, 34% on WordPress or Shopify and only 12% custom. The typical small business site is the nephew's kind, and its price says very little about yours.
What does 1 900 € HT actually buy?
That's the question a dentist in Aix-en-Provence asked me in June. She'd practiced in Boston for ten years and her last website had cost her $8,000 there, so she assumed something was missing from mine.
Most of the 1 900 € is time, about ten working days. The first two or three are spent on a one-page brief and the design, five to seven pages drawn from scratch with no theme. Then I build, which takes about a week with the mobile version, and I test that on a phone over 4G. Testing on Wi-Fi hides most problems. The launch is included too, with DNS, hosting setup, analytics and SSL, and so is the pre-launch checklist. Domain, code and hosting go in your name on day one. The studio page has the details.
Copywriting, photos and ads aren't included, and there's no monthly maintenance fee, since a static site has no database or plugin to update. The dentist had paid $90 a month for six years for "maintenance" on her old site, which comes to $6,480.
Why 1 900 € and not €900? At €900 for two weeks of work I'd be making €90 a day before tax. And why not the €5,000 to €15,000 most agencies ask? Agencies have a project manager, an office in the center of Marseille and a lot of meetings to pay for. I don't, because I work alone from La Ciotat, a small town in the south of France between Marseille and Cassis.
What moves the price
What raises the price the most is anything the site has to do. If visitors need to book an appointment or pay a deposit, each of those features is a small piece of software and has to be built and tested like one. A cooking school in Aix wanted online booking with a deposit last spring, and that turned a 1 900 € HT website into a web application. Those start at 9 000 € HT here.
Where the studio sits matters too. Agencies in Marseille usually charge more than I do, and some of them have good reasons for it, which I go into in this piece on web agencies in Marseille and Provence. If you haven't written your copy yet, it's worth reading what a small business website actually needs before you request quotes, since it changes what you'll ask for.
The costs that never make the quote
One thing to check on any quote is whose name the domain will be registered in. I had a client, a wine estate near Bandol, whose previous developer had registered it in his own name and then stopped replying to emails. We got it back, but it took an afternoon with the registrar and a scan of the owner's passport.
At Gandi a .com is €11 to register and €31.98 a year to renew, before VAT. So when WebFX says a domain costs "$1 to $12 per year," that's the teaser price, not what you'll pay in year three. Ten years of a .com comes to about €300. Not much. But make sure it's in your name before you sign.
Hosting is hard to estimate from published ranges; WebFX says anything from $2 to $1,000 a month. It depends entirely on the type of site. The sites I build are static files, so a small one fits on Netlify's free plan, and its paid plans are $9 or $20 a month if traffic grows. A WordPress site with a lot of plugins is at the other end, and WebFX puts website maintenance at $5 to $5,000 a month. That's the cost of keeping a database and plugins updated, and it's the main thing to compare when you choose between WordPress, Wix or a custom build.
On a website builder, the advertised price is usually the annual rate. Squarespace's Basic plan is $19 a month if you pay for the year and $25 if you pay monthly. Add a scheduling tool, an email address on your domain and a better form, and you're paying for several subscriptions. The charter broker reached $74 a month in four separate charges after eight months.
The biggest cost of a DIY site is usually your own time. The broker did her updates on Sunday evenings once her nephew had gone back to Lyon, and she stopped counting the hours after the first month. Plan on a rebuild every three to five years too.
Reading three quotes without getting burned
Put the same five questions to everyone who quoted. How many pages and how many rounds of revisions are included, and who writes the copy? Who owns the domain and the code if you stop working together? What will you pay in the second year, including hosting and subscriptions? Who do you contact if the contact form stops working on a weekend? And what is the launch date, as a date and not a number of weeks?
Missing answers don't mean a quote is dishonest, only that it's incomplete. Ask. In her case, as in most I've looked at, the difference between $29 a month and £19,000 came down to these five points, and they're a better guide than a portfolio when you're choosing a web agency.
As for the charter broker, she went with her nephew and Squarespace, and I think that was a fair choice at the time. It cost $29 a month and the site was online within a week. Eight months later she was answering booking requests by hand at 11 p.m., since the form didn't connect to her calendar and the add-on to fix it needed a plan upgrade and another $40 a month. We rebuilt the site in three weeks for 1 900 € HT, and the booking button now goes to a ready-made scheduling tool that fills in her calendar.
If you'd like a second opinion on the quotes you have, book a 15-minute call and we'll read them together.
FAQ
How much does a website cost for a small business?
It depends on who builds it. In the US a freelancer charges $3,000 to $10,000 for a brochure site of 5 to 10 pages and an agency $5,000 to $30,000, going by BLS pay data and WebFX; the French quotes my clients forward me are lower, €2,000 to €5,500 from freelancers and mostly €5,000 to €15,000 from agencies. Below $2,000 it's generally a template or a builder subscription. Studio Calanque starts at 1 900 € HT, around $2,200.
How much does website design cost on its own?
On the custom sites I quote, roughly half the price is design, so about $2,000 on a $4,000 freelance quote. On a template site it's close to zero, since nothing was designed for you. Ask whether the quote includes a mockup made for your business or a theme somebody bought.
Does the number of pages change the price?
Not much. Five pages or eight is about half a day of difference on my side. What changes it more is a second language, since everything gets proofread twice and the SEO is set up per language, and photos, which cost €300 to €500 for a half day with a photographer near La Ciotat.
How much does a website cost per month?
If you use Wix or Squarespace, expect $17 to $160 a month on their US price lists, before add-ons. A custom static site only costs the domain, about €32 a year to renew a .com at Gandi, plus hosting, which is free or $9 to $20 a month on Netlify. Maintenance plans are for sites with a database and plugins. A static site has neither.
Is a Wix site cheaper than a custom site?
In the first year, yes. Over five years, Wix's $39.77 Business plan alone comes to about $2,400 before add-ons, which is roughly the price of a custom site with its domain renewals, and the custom site's code belongs to you.