The honest answer is a range: roughly free to $50,000+, depending on who builds it and what it actually has to do. Here's how to figure out which number applies to you — and which parts of the price are worth paying for.
Do-it-yourself builders (Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy) commonly run $0–$50 a month. You do the work, the platform hosts it. Fine for getting something online; the tradeoff is generic templates, slower pages, and limited control over how search engines and AI models read the site.
A freelancer or small shop commonly charges a few hundred to a few thousand dollars for a small-business site. Quality varies enormously at this tier — the price tells you almost nothing. What matters is whether they structure the site around what your customers actually search for, or just make something pretty.
Agencies commonly start around $5,000 and run past $50,000 for custom builds. Some of that buys real expertise. Some of it buys account managers and overhead you never see.
Pages and features are the visible cost drivers: an online store costs more than a brochure site, custom design costs more than a template. But the invisible drivers matter more — whether anyone researched what your customers search for before building, whether the site is structured so Google and AI models can read it, and whether it's built to load fast on a phone.
A cheap site that nobody finds costs more than an expensive site that brings in customers. The real question isn't the sticker price — it's whether the site will ever be the answer when someone searches for what you do.
A domain runs $10–$20 a year. Hosting can be free (static sites) or $10–$50+ a month. Then there's maintenance: platforms and plugins need updates, and some builders charge monthly forever. Ask any builder two questions before signing: what does this cost me per month after launch, and what happens if I want to leave?
Sites here are built static — fast, no plugins to break, hosting costs near zero — and structured around real search queries verified before a single page gets planned. Schema markup goes in from day one so Google, ChatGPT, and Perplexity can read exactly what the business does. That's the same way this site and aoaudit.com are built. No published price list, because every business needs a different amount of work — you get a quote for your actual situation, not a package tier.
A do-it-yourself builder like Wix or Squarespace, commonly $0–$50 a month. It's a real option if the budget is zero — just know the tradeoff is generic structure that search engines and AI models often can't read well, which limits how often the site gets found.
Because the label “website” covers everything from a one-page template to a custom online store. Price also reflects who's doing the work — a solo builder has no agency overhead, so the same quality of work often costs a fraction of an agency quote.
Sometimes. If it covers real hosting and real updates, that's a legitimate cost. If it's a builder holding your site hostage on their platform, it's rent. Always ask what happens to the site if you stop paying — the answer tells you what you actually own.
A static site — plain fast pages with no plugin stack — can cost almost nothing to maintain: a domain renewal around $10–$20 a year and little else. Sites built on plugin-heavy platforms commonly need ongoing paid maintenance to stay secure and working.