This calculator estimates what a website costs to build and to run, by who builds it. It shows ranges rather than a single number, because anyone quoting you a precise figure before seeing your project is guessing. Every range comes from the cost guides we already publish, and the sources are listed under the tool so you can check them.
The one thing worth noticing before you start: over three years, the monthly line is usually bigger than the build fee. That is true of agencies, and it is true of us.
Website Cost Calculator
Ranges, not a quote. Every number comes from the cost guides linked below this tool.
How to Read the Results
Each row is a route to the same goal — a working site — and each column is a different way of counting what it costs.
- Build is the one-time cost to design and launch the site. It is the number on the proposal, and the number most people compare.
- Per month is hosting plus maintenance: keeping the site online, patched, backed up and working. For stores it also includes the platform and app subscriptions for your catalog size.
- First year is the build plus twelve months. It is the number to budget.
- Three years is the build plus thirty-six months. It is the number to compare, because a business site is normally kept for years and redesigned only when it stops working.
The ranges are wide because the market is. A freelancer's business site genuinely runs anywhere from $2,500 to $5,000, and a boutique agency's from $5,000 to $15,000. Where you land depends on design customization, revision rounds, the provider's overhead, and how much of the writing and strategy they include. If a quote sits well outside a range, that is not automatically a red flag — but it is worth asking what explains the difference.
The Monthly Line Is Usually the Bigger Number
Build fees get compared because they arrive first and all at once. Monthly fees arrive quietly and keep arriving.
Take a business site of 10 to 15 pages. A large agency typically charges $10,000 to $25,000 to build it and $500 to $2,000 or more per month to maintain it. Pair the low ends and three years of monthly fees come to 1.8 times the build; pair the high ends and it is 2.9 times. A boutique agency is closer to even: its three years of maintenance run 0.7 to 1.2 times its build fee.
Our own pricing has the same shape, and it is worth being plain about that. The Maintain plan is $99 a month, which over three years is $3,564 — 2.4 times the $1,500 build. That is deliberate: the model moves cost out of the up-front fee and into a monthly plan that covers hosting, monitoring and change requests. It is also exactly why you should compare three-year totals rather than build prices, including when the comparison is against us. On the same basis, a Built For Rank business site on Maintain comes to about $5,100 over three years, against $8,600 to $33,000 for a boutique agency.
The practical rule: before you sign anything, multiply the monthly fee by 36 and add it to the build. Whichever route wins on that number is the cheaper one.
Where the Numbers Come From
Nothing in the calculator is modeled or invented for this page. Each input maps to a range we already publish:
- Build and monthly costs for small and business sites come from the provider-type ranges and comparison table in our website design cost guide: DIY builders, freelancers, boutique agencies and large agencies.
- Store builds come from the design-and-build ranges in our ecommerce website cost guide, and store running costs from its table of platform, app, and hosting costs by catalog size.
- Copywriting, photography and domain costs come from the hidden-costs section of the cost guide — $50 to $150 per page for basic web copy, $200 to $500 per page for SEO-optimized copy, $500 to $2,000 for a professional photo shoot.
- The Built For Rank row reads directly from our published pricing, so it cannot drift from what we actually charge: a $1,500 build and plans at $20, $99, $249 and $499 a month.
- DIY time uses the estimate from the same guides: 60 to 100 or more hours for a business site, 40 to 100 or more for a store.
These are market ranges compiled for those guides, not quotes from specific providers. They exclude payment processing, email mailboxes, advertising, and custom functionality.
What a Calculator Cannot Price
Pages are predictable. Functionality is not. Online booking against a real calendar, a client portal, quoting that turns into invoices, a CRM your team works out of — each of those is its own project, and any calculator that prices them from a dropdown is making the number up.
What a calculator can do is show you the cost people most often leave out: per-user software. Booking tools, CRMs and client portals are usually priced per seat, per month, forever. As a real example, SimplePractice, the practice-management platform many therapists use, lists its top plan at $99 a month for the first clinician and $74 for each additional one. A six-clinician group pays $469 a month — $16,884 over three years — and every new hire raises it. We walk through that arithmetic in more depth on our therapist website design page.
The trade-off runs in both directions, and it is worth stating plainly. For a solo operator, a per-seat tool is almost always cheaper than building anything, and we will say so. The math changes with headcount. Custom business software and a custom CRM are priced the other way round: a flat fee to build the system, then an ongoing plan tied to what it uses — hosting, support and changes — never to how many people log in. Enter your own per-user price and headcount in the calculator's optional section to see which side of that line you are on.
The Cost That Doesn't Show Up: Keeping the Site Current
The monthly figures in the other rows buy maintenance — the site stays online and patched. They do not buy new content, and a site that never publishes anything tends to lose ground to competitors that do.
That is the real difference between our plans. Host and Maintain are maintenance plans, like the other rows, with one or two change requests a month included. Grow ($249 a month) and Scale ($499 a month) add two and four SEO blog posts a month respectively, plus reporting and keyword tracking — the posts published through website automation on a set schedule and reviewed by a person before they go live. If you pick Grow or Scale in the calculator, compare it against what ongoing SEO costs elsewhere — our SEO pricing guide covers that — rather than against maintenance alone. For what the maintenance line itself should include, see website maintenance cost.
When the Cheapest Row Is the Right Answer
Sometimes the DIY builder wins, and a calculator that never says so is a sales page.
A builder at $10 to $50 a month is the better spend when the site is essentially one page, when your customers arrive from referrals or social media rather than search, and when you have the hours to set it up. It is also the right starting point for a small store whose traffic will come from social or ads: a hosted platform gets you selling quickly, and you can revisit the decision once organic search matters.
The calculator puts a number on the part people skip, which is time. At 60 hours, if your time is worth $75 an hour, a "free" website has cost you $4,500 before it earns anything. That is not an argument against DIY — plenty of owners have the time and enjoy the work — but it belongs in the comparison.
Get a Real Number
The calculator narrows the range. A number you can budget against needs someone to look at the actual project. If you want one, request a free consultation and we will tell you what your site should cost — including when the honest answer is a builder and an afternoon.