What should a business website actually cost?

Why prices vary so wildly

You'll see quotes anywhere from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands for what looks like a similar result. The gap usually comes down to three things: who's actually doing the work, what platform it's built on, and how much is bundled in beyond the build itself.

What you're really paying for

• Design and build. The actual work of turning your business into pages that make sense — this is the one-time cost, and it should scale with how much custom work is involved, not with how many pages you have.
• Hosting. For a simple business site, hosting is close to free with modern infrastructure (static hosting on providers like Cloudflare). If someone is charging a large recurring fee purely for hosting, you're overpaying for that line item specifically.
• Maintenance. This is the legitimate recurring cost — security patches, updates, small content changes, uptime monitoring. WordPress-based sites typically need more of this (plugin updates, database upkeep) than a modern static site does, which is a real cost difference, not just a sales angle.

Where prices usually get inflated

Agency overhead, unnecessary custom features nobody asked for, and hosting/maintenance bundles priced like they require far more ongoing work than they actually do — especially on simpler, modern tech stacks. Ask directly what a quote covers and whether hosting and maintenance are separate from the build.

A reasonable way to think about it

For a straightforward business site: expect a fixed, agreed-upfront price for the build, and decide separately whether you want someone to host and maintain it for you afterward, or whether you'll manage that yourself. Treat those as two different decisions, not one bundled number.