L70 Labs / Pricing guide
Pricing guide
What a small business website actually costs in 2026.
Quotes for the same website range from nothing to fifty thousand dollars, which tells you the price is not really about the website. Here is what each option costs, what drives the number, and how to tell which one you are actually buying.
The short answer: $0 to $50,000
The rest of this page explains why that range is so wide, and where a sane number sits for most businesses.
The four ways to get a website, and what each really costs
There are only four real options, and the price gap between them is mostly about who does the thinking and who carries the risk.
DIY builders, $0 to $600 a year. Wix, Squarespace, Shopify. The software is cheap, your time is not. Expect 20 to 60 hours to get something you are not embarrassed by, and the result usually looks like the template it came from. Fine for validating an idea, weak when a customer is comparing you to a competitor.
Freelancers, $500 to $5,000. Enormous variance in quality and reliability. The good ones are excellent value. The risk is not price, it is disappearance: a freelancer who stops replying halfway through leaves you with nothing you can use, and you carry that risk entirely.
Traditional agencies, $5,000 to $50,000. You are buying process and accountability, and paying for the overhead that produces them. A discovery phase, an account manager, a project manager, a designer, a developer, and six to twelve weeks. For a company with a complex product and internal stakeholders, that structure earns its cost. For a dental practice that needs five pages and a booking link, it does not.
Productized studios, $500 to $3,000. Fixed scope, fixed price, fixed timeline. You give up bespoke discovery and unlimited revisions. You get a professional result quickly at a predictable number. This is the category we are in, at $499 plus $149 a month.
What actually drives the price
Almost none of it is the design.
The cost drivers, in order of weight: the number of unique page templates, whether the content already exists or has to be written, whether anything needs to connect to another system such as a booking tool or a payment processor, how many rounds of revision are allowed, and how much of the agency's overhead sits between you and the person doing the work.
That last one is the biggest and the least visible. In an $8,000 quote, a large share is paying for the sales process that produced the quote. This is why the same five page site can be $800 or $12,000 and both prices are internally logical.
The monthly cost nobody quotes upfront
A website is not a one time purchase, and any quote presented as one is incomplete.
After launch you still pay for hosting, a domain, an SSL certificate, backups, security updates and someone to change the opening hours when they change. Budget $20 to $300 a month depending on how much is handled for you. A $0 quote for maintenance usually means the maintenance is not happening, which is why so many small business sites are quietly broken, slow or running an outdated stack two years after launch.
When you compare quotes, compare the three year total, not the launch fee. A $6,000 build with no maintenance plan and a $499 build with $149 a month land in a similar place over three years, except one of them stays fast, current and ranking.
Questions to ask before you sign anything
- Do I own the code and the domain, or does the agency hold them?
- What is the total cost over three years, including hosting and maintenance?
- What happens if I want to leave, and what do I take with me?
- How many revision rounds are included, and what does an extra one cost?
- Is the site built to be read by search engines and AI assistants, or only by humans?
- Who writes the copy, and is that included in the number I was quoted?
Where we sit, stated plainly
We charge $499 to build and $149 a month to keep it running. That is roughly $2,300 over the first year and $5,900 over three years, all in, including hosting, maintenance and unlimited small edits.
We are not the cheapest option, a builder you assemble yourself is cheaper. We are not the most thorough either, an agency running a full discovery phase will go deeper into your positioning than we will. We are the right choice when you need a professional site quickly, at a number you know in advance, without spending six weeks in meetings to get there.
If your project genuinely needs the agency treatment, we will tell you that instead of selling you the package.
How it works
Decide the category first
Pick DIY, freelancer, agency or productized studio based on complexity and risk tolerance, not on the lowest quote.
Compare three year totals
Launch fee plus hosting plus maintenance. A cheap build with no plan is rarely the cheapest outcome.
Check ownership before signing
If you do not own the code and the domain, the price is not the real cost.
Questions we get asked
How much should a small business website cost in 2026?
For most small businesses needing five to ten pages, a sane range is $500 to $3,000 to build, plus $20 to $300 a month to run. Below $500 you are usually buying a template you assemble yourself. Above $5,000 you are buying agency process, which is worth it for complex projects and wasted on simple ones.
Is a $499 website too cheap to be real?
It depends entirely on what funds it. A $499 one time fee with no ongoing relationship is usually a template with the logo swapped. A $499 build attached to a monthly plan is a customer acquisition price, the studio earns over time and therefore has an interest in the site continuing to work. Ask which model you are being sold.
Why do agencies hide their prices?
Because the discovery call is the sales process. Getting you on a call lets them anchor the price to your perceived budget rather than to the work. It is effective, and it is also why identical projects get wildly different quotes from the same agency.
What is the cheapest way to get a professional website?
Doing it yourself on a builder is cheapest in money and most expensive in time. If your hourly rate is meaningful, 40 hours on Squarespace costs more than a productized build. The genuinely cheap option is only cheap if your time is worth nothing.
Do I need to pay monthly for a website?
You pay monthly whether it is itemized or not. Hosting, domain, SSL and updates have a cost. The question is whether it is bundled and handled, or unbundled and forgotten until something breaks.
How long should a small business website take?
A five page site should take one to three weeks. Anything quoted at three months for a brochure site is a scheduling problem, not a complexity problem.
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