How Much Does a Small Business Website Cost in 2026? My Actual Price List

"How much does a website cost?"

I get this question in almost every first call. The old version of this post answered it with "somewhere between 1,500 and 15,000 euros." Technically true. Completely useless. You could say the same thing about a used car.

So this version starts with my own price list and ends with the running costs that show up after launch, when nobody is looking at the invoice anymore.

Some context first. The first website I ever sold cost €250. I spent around 40 hours on it. Today the smallest project I take on is €4,500. I wrote about how I got from one number to the other, and the short version is that clients aren't paying for my hours. They're paying for what I learned on the hundred-plus projects in between.

My Actual Website Prices for a Small Business

These are the numbers from the price list I use when I write proposals. They're net prices in euros, before German VAT, because that's how I invoice.

• Astro + Cloudflare site: €4,500 to €6,000, 3 to 5 weeks. Custom design, SEO basics, near-zero hosting cost, and a GitHub handoff with training so you can make edits yourself.
• WordPress + Bricks Builder site: €4,500 to €8,000, 4 to 6 weeks. For teams that publish regularly and already know WordPress.
• Next.js + Directus application: €10,000 to €35,000, 2 to 5 months. Dashboards, logins, integrations, multiple languages.
• Monthly retainer: €1,000 a month. Ongoing improvements, content, maintenance and a 24-hour response time.

Most small businesses I talk to land in the first or second row. The third row is where a "website" turns out to be a piece of software, and that's usually the moment the budget conversation gets awkward. If you can't tell which one you need, I wrote down how I decide between WordPress, Next.js and Astro for client projects.

The invoice also arrives later than most people expect. I build the site on my own server, you review it on a live link, I revise until you're happy, and only then do I send the invoice and move everything to your server. You don't pay for something you haven't seen.

What Freelancers and Agencies Charge

My numbers sit inside a very wide market. When I researched rates for my post on how much to charge for a website as a freelancer, these were the ranges people were quoting:

• Simple brochure site (5 to 7 pages), freelancer: $1,500 to $5,000
• Custom business site with CMS, forms and integrations, freelancer: $5,000 to $15,000
• E-commerce or complex web app: $10,000 to $35,000+
• Boutique agency (2 to 5 people): $6,000 to $12,000
• Full-service agency: $12,000 to $35,000+

Hourly rates swing with geography. A senior developer in the US charges $78 to $125+ an hour, Western Europe sits at $64 to $108, Eastern Europe at $25 to $65. I'm in Augsburg working mostly for US clients, which puts me somewhere in between.

If a quote lands far below these ranges, ask what's missing. If it lands far above, ask what you're paying for. A decent developer answers both questions without getting defensive.

Why My Cheapest Site Isn't €250 Anymore

Forty hours for €250 works out to about €6 an hour, before tax, with free support thrown in. And I did throw it in: for three years I maintained client sites without charging anything, because I was scared of losing those clients. When I finally offered five of them a maintenance package at €120 a month, all five said yes.

That taught me something about pricing that applies to you as the buyer too. You're not paying for the time the work takes. You're paying for how short that time can be. I once built an e-commerce integration with tax rules for different EU countries in 6 hours. Someone without that background could easily need 40 hours for the same thing, and charge you for all of them.

So when you compare quotes, the hourly rate is the wrong number to stare at. The total and what's included tell you much more.

What Actually Moves the Price

The most common reason a website launch stalls is missing text. Over the years, content has been the biggest obstacle to going live on my projects, ahead of design and code. If you don't have copy yet, someone has to write it. Either budget for it or block out the evenings to do it yourself.

After that, the price comes down to a handful of things:

Size and complexity. A clean ten-page informational site with standard customization costs less than a heavily customized 50-page site with all the bells and whistles. More page templates mean more design and more testing.

Custom functionality. Sometimes a plugin or an existing service does exactly what you need. Sometimes it takes a lot of trial and error to get the site to do what you want. Logins, bookings, payments and integrations with other tools are where estimates grow.

Design revisions. Most projects start with a first concept, followed by revision rounds. One or two rounds have been enough on almost every project I've done. Every extra round costs time, and time shows up in the price.

Branding. If you don't have a logo yet, that's a separate job with a separate budget. Don't let it hide inside the website quote.

The platform. This one affects the build price a little and the running costs a lot, which brings me to the part most quotes leave out.

The Running Costs Nobody Puts in the Quote

In September 2026 I priced a typical small business WordPress stack line by line: managed hosting, page builder, caching, SEO, backups, security, forms, image optimization and a theme. Year one came to roughly $1,090. Year two, after the introductory discounts expire, about $1,330, or $111 a month for the same site. The full line-by-line breakdown of WordPress hosting and plugin costs is its own post.

The money is the predictable part. The unpredictable part is an update that goes wrong. On an older WordPress site, it looks like this:

Or like this:

Or this:

And sometimes the error comes with a message that tells you nothing at all:

Hosts eventually force sites onto newer PHP versions. When PHP 7.4 reached end of life in November 2022, a wave of older themes and plugins threw fatal errors as hosts moved everyone to 8.x. That's one of the things that actually break on websites nobody maintains, and it's why a properly maintained WordPress site, with hosting, premium plugins, security monitoring and a developer retainer, can run $5,000 to $15,000 a year.

A static site on Cloudflare Pages is a different story. Hosting a small brochure site there costs nothing, and the domain is around $10 a year. Add a paid CMS seat and a paid email service for the contact form and you're at roughly $430 a year. That gap is the main reason Astro is my default recommendation for most new small business sites.

Maintenance plans from other providers typically run €150 to €600 a month for a business site. My retainer is €1,000 a month, and it covers improvements and content, which is more than keeping the lights on. Whether you need any of that depends almost entirely on the stack you pick.

Building It Yourself: Cheap in Money, Expensive in Time

Even a simple website will take you 20 to 40 hours to get to something you're proud of, and that's if you've built one before. If you're completely new to it, multiply by two or three. I'm not exaggerating.

Website builders make the start easy. The cost creeps in later: apps and widgets typically run 5 to 15 dollars a month each, and I've seen builder setups cross 100 dollars a month without anyone deciding that on purpose. I wrote up the signs that you've outgrown your website builder, along with the signs that you haven't, because plenty of businesses are fine where they are.

The bigger cost is the one that never shows up on a statement. Building a website feels like a monumental task, so people put it off for weeks or months. Some never finish. Tasks that take an experienced developer 10 minutes can eat 2 to 4 hours of research when you're doing them for the first time.

If you have more time than money right now and the technology doesn't scare you, DIY is a perfectly valid choice. Just count your hours as part of the price.

The €490 Website in Your Inbox

A business owner in my town recently got a DM with a slick, working mockup of his own business website. Logo and photos included. Price: 490 euros, one time. He almost said yes on the spot.

Do the math on that offer. Hosting and a domain cost money every single year. Real maintenance runs €150 to €600 a month for a business site. A one-time payment of 490 euros funds none of that, so either the work stops the moment the invoice clears, or someone is reselling a white-label tool and hoping you never ask questions. I wrote a whole post on how to spot a real web developer vs. an AI website reseller.

Unusually low prices usually end one of two ways: poor work, or paying extra for every little change later. The cheap site often turns into the expensive one when it has to be rebuilt from scratch.

So What Should You Budget?

For a small business site built by a professional, the realistic range is $1,500 to $15,000 across the freelance market, and €4,500 to €8,000 with me for most brochure and content sites. On top of that come running costs between roughly $10 a year for a static site and $1,330 a year for a typical WordPress stack, before anyone has touched maintenance.

I build websites for a living, so I'll add the part that works against me: if money is tight right now and DIY is your only option, build it yourself and do the best you can. A simple site that exists beats a perfect site that's still in planning.

If you can afford it, hiring someone experienced saves you time and a lot of headaches, and the result will usually be better than what you'd build alone. I pay accountants and roofers for the same reason. They do the job faster and better than I could.

What I can't tell you from a blog post is which row of the price list your project belongs in. If you want a number instead of a range, send me what you have in mind. I'll tell you which option fits, including when the answer is a website builder and not my web development work.