If you ask five people what a small business website costs, you will get five answers, ranging from "nothing, I built it myself" to "fifteen thousand dollars". All of them can be true, because they are describing different things: a project, a subscription, a hobby, and a service.
Here is the honest breakdown.
The four ways people get a website
1. Do it yourself (Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy). Around $16 to $25 a month, forever. You get a template and a login. What you do not get is someone to design it, write it, or fix it when it breaks. Cancel the subscription and the site disappears.
2. A cheap one-off build. Somewhere between $500 and $3,000 from a freelancer, often a friend of a friend. You get a site. What you do not get is anyone to update it in two years, when the contact form quietly stops delivering or the person who built it has changed phone numbers.
3. An agency. $5,000 to $20,000 and up for a full brand and site. Genuinely good for larger companies. For a five-person business it is usually more than the job requires.
4. A done-for-you service. A flat annual fee for a finished site on your own domain, plus the email and the maintenance. This is the category Sweetspot is in, and it is often the one small businesses actually want, once they see the math.
What you are really paying for
Strip away the design and every website has the same running costs:
- Domain name: roughly $10 to $15 a year. Cheap, and worth owning in your own name.
- Hosting and SSL: often "free" inside a builder subscription, but you are paying for it monthly.
- Email at your domain: the one most people forget. hello@yourbusiness.com looks established. A Gmail address does not.
- Changes and fixes: the bill nobody budgets for, because it arrives as "the site broke and I do not know who to call".
The hidden cost: drift
The most expensive website is the one nobody maintains. Prices change, staff change, a plugin falls out of date, a form stops delivering, and the site quietly turns from an asset into a liability.
So the real question is not what a website costs. It is who owns it after launch.
A simple way to decide
Ask yourself one question: am I buying a project, or a service?
- If you want a project, hire a good freelancer, get the files, and budget the time to maintain them.
- If you want it handled, buy the service. One flat fee, someone else's problem.
Sweetspot is the second kind. From $99 a year, you get a finished site on your own domain, email addresses that forward into the Gmail you already use, and hosting, SSL, and renewals handled for you. Built in 48 hours, and you own everything.
If you would rather talk it through first, send me a message and I will tell you which option actually fits.