How much does a website cost for a small business?

If you're budgeting for a new website, the numbers online are all over the place. Some builders advertise a few dollars a month, and some agencies quote five figures. Here's how the options actually break down, what Bizfloo charges, and what you'll pay after launch.

What are the main ways to get a small business website?

Do it yourself on a website builder. You pay a monthly plan and build the site yourself. Published guides put most builder plans at about $15 to $50 a month. It's the cheapest way to start, but you pay every month for as long as the site is up, you do the work, and you're limited to what the platform allows.

Hire a freelancer. The same guides put freelance builds at roughly $1,500 to $8,000. Quality and reliability vary a lot from one freelancer to the next, so look at their past work and ask who handles fixes after launch.

Hire an agency. Agencies bring a team: strategy, design, development and project management. They put most professional builds at $3,000 to $15,000, and larger projects go higher. Around the Triangle, some studios post starting prices of about $4,000.

Use a flat-price studio like Bizfloo. You get a custom-coded site at a posted price, with the scope written down before work starts.

What does Bizfloo charge?

Website, $250 one-time. Up to five pages, custom design, mobile-first layout, basic SEO, contact forms, and basic booking or Square checkout if you need it. A year of support is included, and Bizfloo handles content updates for you.

Website + Business Suite, $500 one-time. Up to ten pages plus the Business Suite dashboard: online booking with a calendar, blocked dates and capacity rules, Square checkout with deposits and gift cards, an order builder, customer accounts, a customer list, reports, a pages editor, promo and referral codes, and email and text blasts.

Enterprise, from $1,000. Unlimited pages and a blog, memberships and subscriptions, staff logins with roles, a technician app, GPS and route tracking, connections to tools like QuickBooks, and workflow automation. Work beyond Enterprise's listed scope gets its own quote.

Every package can be paid over time: about $63 a month over 4 months for Website, about $100 a month over 5 months for Website + Business Suite, and about $167 a month over 6 months for Enterprise.

What ongoing costs should you plan for?

A domain name usually runs about $10 to $20 a year. Hosting ranges widely, from a couple of dollars a month for basic shared hosting to over $100 a month for managed plans, according to the same guides.

Bizfloo hosting is optional. Hosting Basic is $30 a month or $300 a year. Hosting + Updates is $50 a month and includes up to three content updates a month with same-week turnaround. If you take card payments, Square charges its own processing fee on each payment.

You own your site's code, so you can host it with Bizfloo or move it somewhere else later.

What makes a website cost more?

Page count is part of it, but features matter more. Online booking, payments, customer accounts, memberships and connections to other software all take real build time. So does anything custom, like a quote calculator that prices a job from the customer's answers.

Your content matters too. If your text, photos and logo are ready, the build moves fast. If they need to be written or created, that adds time and sometimes cost.

What shouldn't you pay extra for?

A mobile-friendly layout, a sitemap, page titles and descriptions, basic schema markup and fast load times should be part of any professional build, not add-ons. If a quote lists them as extras, ask why.

Be careful with per-page pricing on a simple site, too. Adding a page to a well-built site is a small job.

How do you get an exact price?

Answer a few questions in Bizfloo's price calculator and your price shows on screen in about two minutes. Every completed quote includes a free homepage mockup, so you see the design before you commit.