Nobody will give you a number. You call three people about a website, and all three want a discovery call before they'll say anything about price. You sit through the calls, and two weeks later you get a proposal with a number on page nine that's four times what you expected. That's not a pricing process. That's a sales process.
So here are the numbers, up front, without the call.
What the market actually charges
A local agency quoting a small business site in the Twin Cities is usually somewhere between ten and thirty thousand dollars. That's not gouging. That quote has a project manager in it, a designer, a developer, an account person, and the overhead of an office and a sales team that had to find you. Four people touching the project means four people getting paid, plus the margin that keeps the lights on between contracts.
At the other end, there's the marketplace freelancer at eight hundred dollars. Some of them are good. Most of that work is a template with your logo dropped in, built by someone you will never reach again, with no plan for what happens when you need to change something in March.
Then there's the platform route, which looks like the cheap option and isn't. A Squarespace site runs twenty something dollars a month and feels free compared to a real quote. I did that math already in the real cost of a Squarespace site over five years, and it comes out between fifty five hundred and seven thousand dollars once you add the domain, the scheduling add-on, the email tool, and a couple of rounds of design help. At the end of it you own nothing and the bill keeps coming in year six.
What I charge, and why
Most of the small business sites I build land between three thousand and eight thousand dollars. Flat quote, no monthly care fee, and you own the code when it's done.
The reason I can price under an agency isn't that I'm cutting corners or working for less than the job is worth. It's that the build genuinely takes less time than it did three years ago. I write the site on a real codebase, and a large part of what used to be slow, careful typing is now fast, careful editing. The design thinking, the questions about what the site is supposed to do, the redirect map, the content work, all of that still takes exactly as long as it always did. The mechanical part got cheaper, so the price did too. I'd rather say that plainly than pretend the old rate is still justified.
What I'm not doing is quoting two thousand and then finding reasons to bill you for the rest. A number that's too low is a number that comes with a fight later.
What moves the price
The biggest driver is page count and what's on the pages. A five page site for a contractor with services, about, gallery, contact, and one city page is at the bottom of that range. A site with twelve service pages, a real blog, and location pages for four suburbs is at the top.
Second is forms. Not how many form fields, but where the submission goes. A form that emails you is nearly free. A form that checks availability, routes by service type, texts you, and drops a record somewhere you can follow up from is a different build, because it's software, not a page. That's usually the line between a site that looks fine and a site that does work.
Third is content. If you have copy and decent photos, we move. If every page has to be written from scratch and your photos are phone pictures from 2019, that adds weeks and it adds cost. Photography is the thing that stretches timelines more than anything technical.
Fourth, and this is the one people don't ask about until later, is whether the site needs to support automation down the road. Booking, intake that routes somewhere real, an agent that answers inquiries at ten at night. Building on a stack that can carry that costs the same today as building on one that can't. It only costs more if you skip it now and rebuild in two years. That's most of the argument in what makes a website AI-ready.
The part that changes the math
Here's what actually separates a custom build from the platform option, and it isn't the design.
At the end of a platform subscription, you have a login. At the end of a build with me, you have the source code and the domain, and you can host it anywhere or hand it to any developer in town. That's what owning your website means in practice, and it's why the comparison isn't really five thousand dollars versus twenty five dollars a month. It's five thousand dollars once versus a bill that never stops and an asset you never get.
If you want to know what your specific site would cost, the honest answer is that I need to look at what you have now. Not because I'm hiding the number, but because the number depends on page count, forms, and content, and I'd be guessing without seeing them. I've written out exactly what the rebuild process looks like, including what you're on the hook for and when.
If you want to talk through what this would look like for your business, the audit is free and takes 30 minutes. Get in touch