Pricing · Plainly
Between $900 and $5,000; nothing on the four levels is priced above that ceiling. The four levels and what's in each are published on the main page. (A site built in three dimensions is a different kind of build with its own prices; see the last question below.) This page explains the part nobody publishes: what actually moves the number, and what it costs you after I'm finished.
What actually moves it
A beautiful site does not cost meaningfully more than a plain one. The taste is free, and the same person is doing it either way. What costs money is everything the site needs before it can be built at all.
This is the biggest single factor by a distance. If you hand me finished copy and usable photographs, we are assembling. If I have to research the business, verify the claims and write every word first, that is most of the job and the price reflects it. Bring what you have and the number comes down.
The second page of a site costs a fraction of the first, because the system is already built. Ten similar pages are cheap. Three genuinely different ones, say a menu, an obituary archive and a booking flow, are not, because each one is a new problem.
Reservations, online ordering, patient booking, payment. Each one is another system with its own rules, its own account and its own ways of breaking. These are also where the ongoing costs live, and they are usually the fees nobody mentioned to you during the sales call.
For a restaurant or a shop with a beautiful room, real photography is often the best money in the whole budget. It is a separate cost, paid straight to the photographer, and I add nothing to it. For plenty of businesses the honest answer is that we design something type-led and skip it entirely.
After launch
Typically fifteen to twenty-five dollars a year, paid by you, registered in your name, on your card. Never mine. If a web designer owns your domain, they own your business's address, and that is a hostage situation people discover at the worst possible moment.
Yours
Usually free, sometimes a few dollars a month. These sites are plain files with no database, no content system and nothing to keep patched, so they run on hosting that costs almost nothing and almost never goes down. That is a deliberate design decision, not a shortcut.
Near zero
Booking, ordering and payment platforms charge their own monthly fees or take their own percentage, and those are paid by you directly to them. I will tell you the real number before we choose one, because this is where a cheap website quietly turns into an expensive one.
Theirs, not mine
Optional. Changes, checks and someone to call. Plenty of these sites need nothing done to them for a year, and I would rather say that than sell a retainer for work that isn't there.
Optional
The domain and hosting figures above are ordinary market rates. I don't resell either. The point of listing them is that you should know what you are committing to before you commit, including the parts I make no money on.
Questions
Because "website" covers a template filled in over an afternoon and a researched, written, custom-built site, and both use the same word. The work is genuinely different, so the number is genuinely different. What almost never explains the gap is how good it looks.
Sometimes, genuinely, yes, and I would rather tell you that now than take your money. If you need a simple presence, you have your own photographs and you can write your own words, a builder is a reasonable answer. Hire a person when your business has something specific to prove, when the facts need checking, or when looking like everyone else is the actual problem.
Because for an ordinary site, much above five thousand dollars you are no longer buying a better website, you are buying an agency's overhead: account managers, an office and a bigger meeting. One person doing all of it does not have those costs, so charging as though I did would be dishonest. The one exception is a site built in three dimensions, which is a different amount of work: the next question.
A 3D site has the business's object in it (a watch, a ring, an instrument), modelled in Blender and drawn live, so the visitor can turn it over and take it apart (like this). Modelling, lighting, storyboarding and testing on phones and laptops take 125 to 300 hours, so it has its own prices: $7,500 to $10,000 for one scene on an otherwise ordinary site, $10,000 to $14,000 for a storyboarded scroll story, and $14,000 to $18,000 for several scenes sharing one world. It is kept on a $350-a-month care plan, because a 3D site nobody looks after breaks within a year as browsers change. Most businesses never need one.
Yes to a deposit, and it is written down before anything starts, along with what happens if either of us wants to stop. You own the site at final payment. Nothing about that is left to be worked out later, because "we'll sort it out" is how these arrangements go wrong.
Begin
Tell me what you run, what you already have, and what your current site gets wrong. You'll get a number and the reasoning behind it, not a discovery call.
An email reaches the same person directly. If you would rather set the brief out in full, with what you need, where to start and how quickly, there is a short form on the studio page, and it goes to the same address.