Free Website Cost Calculator for Small Business (2026)

Website prices vary because businesses need different levels of strategy, design, content, integrations, ecommerce, and ongoing care. A simple brochure site and a lead-generation site with tracking and landing pages should not be priced the same way.

This calculator provides a planning estimate, not a quote. Use it to compare scope, avoid missing costs, and decide what belongs in phase one.

The assumptions in this calculator describe paid vendor work. Before you use the number, decide whether you are buying vendor work at all, because the three routes differ far more in what they cost you in time and risk than in what they cost in cash.

Building it yourself on a website platform is genuinely viable for a simple informational site. The cash cost drops to a subscription. The real cost is your hours and the ceiling on what you can achieve — most owners can produce something presentable, and most cannot produce something that converts well or is easy to change later.

A freelancer is usually the best value for a well-defined project where you know what you want. You get one person's judgement, which is efficient when the brief is clear and fragile when it is not — holidays, illness, and other clients are real risks with no cover.

An agency costs more because you are buying coordination as well as work: a designer, a developer, a writer, and someone to keep them in order. That is worth paying for when the project has enough moving parts that coordination is the hard bit, and wasteful when it does not.

The honest test is not 'which is cheapest' but 'which failure would hurt more' — paying too much, or having a site that does not bring in enquiries.

A trades business that gets its work from referrals and needs somewhere credible to send people. Five or six pages, no integrations, a phone number and a contact form.

In this calculator that is the basic base with little or nothing added — the smallest planning figure the tool produces. It is also the case where DIY is most defensible, because there is little that can go structurally wrong.

The thing to spend on here is not the site. It is the photography and the specificity of the copy, because for this business the site's only job is to make a referred visitor confident enough to call.

Where owners waste money on this project type: adding a blog nobody will write, adding a booking system nobody will use, and paying for pages that duplicate what the phone call covers.

A service business that wants the site to produce enquiries rather than just exist. Service pages that sell, forms that work, tracking that shows where enquiries came from, and pages built to be advertised against.

This is the lead-generation base, and the scope grows through service pages and copywriting rather than through technology. In the dental example above, copywriting was 18% of the project — for this project type that proportion is normal and cutting it is usually a mistake, since the copy is the part doing the selling.

Budget deliberately for conversion tracking. A lead-generation site without working tracking cannot tell you which pages or campaigns produced enquiries, which means every future marketing decision is a guess — including the ones you will make with the calculators on this site.

Where owners waste money: building twenty location pages that say the same thing with the town name swapped. That is thin content, it rarely ranks, and it costs $350 a page in this model to produce something that can actively harm the site.

Once money or scheduling moves through the site, the nature of the project changes. It is no longer a marketing asset; it is an operational system, and it fails in operational ways.

The ecommerce base is higher for that reason, but the base is often the smaller part of the story. Catalogue setup, product photography, shipping and tax configuration, payment processing, and stock synchronisation are all real work, and several of them sit in this calculator's exclusion list.

Recurring costs also behave differently. Transaction fees, app subscriptions, and platform plans scale with your success, so the 3% care assumption in this model is likely to understate the true ongoing cost of a transactional site.

Where owners underestimate: the operational side. Someone has to process orders, handle refunds, answer 'where is my delivery', and keep stock accurate. None of that is in the build cost and all of it starts on launch day.

Rebuilding an existing site is not the same project as building a new one, and this calculator does not distinguish them. If you are redesigning, treat its output as the floor.

The extra work is migration: moving content, mapping every old URL to a new one, preserving the pages that currently bring in enquiries, and keeping analytics comparable across the change. Skipping the redirect mapping is the classic way to lose search visibility overnight on a site that was performing perfectly well.

Before scoping a redesign, find out which pages currently produce enquiries and which currently bring in search traffic. Those pages constrain the redesign — they can be improved, but they should not be casually deleted or reorganised because a new navigation looked tidier.

Budget for a post-launch fix window. Something always breaks, and the difference between a good and bad redesign is usually how quickly it gets caught.

The calculator separates project cost from monthly care for a reason: owners routinely approve the first and never plan for the second.

For the dental example, first-year cost is the $14,640 planning budget plus twelve months of care at $366 — about $19,032. Years two and three are $4,392 each. Over three years the site costs roughly $27,816, and less than half of that is the build.

That three-year view is the right one for a decision, because it is the horizon over which a small business site stays useful before it needs significant work again.

It also reframes the cheap-quote question. A build that is $3,000 cheaper but needs replacing a year sooner is not cheaper.

In this model page count and integrations are the two scope levers with the most direct effect, and they behave differently.

Pages are close to linear: each one beyond the first five adds a fixed amount, and adding copywriting to it adds more. So the way to control page cost is to be ruthless about which pages exist. Every page should have a reason someone would land on it.

Integrations are lumpy in reality even though this model prices them flat. Connecting an email platform is an afternoon; connecting a practice-management system with two-way sync can dominate a project. If one of your integrations is genuinely complex, treat the calculator's figure as a floor and get it quoted separately.

A useful exercise: run the calculator twice, once with your full wish list and once with only what the business needs to take an enquiry. The gap between the two is your phase two, and seeing it in dollars usually makes the phasing decision obvious.

The output is most useful before you speak to anyone, as a way to write a brief that lets vendors quote the same thing.

Send every vendor the same scope: the page list, the integration list, who is writing what, and what you consider in scope for launch. Ask each to price against it and to state explicitly what they have excluded. The exclusions are where the differences hide.

When quotes come back, compare structure before price. A quote well below your planning budget is not necessarily good news — it may be excluding content, tracking, or post-launch support you assumed was included.

Ask three questions of every quote: what happens if content is late, what is included in the first month after launch, and what the ongoing cost is. The answers separate vendors more reliably than the headline number.