We spent a day collecting web design prices from 50 top-listed agencies, 34 published price lists, 6 website builders and 2 freelance marketplaces. Here is everything we found, with a link for every number and the raw dataset to download.
The short version: 78.6% of the top agencies we could reach publish no prices at all. Meanwhile the cost guides ranking on Google claim anywhere from $100 to $35,000 for the same small-business website, and all 7 of the ones we reviewed sell the thing they price.
So the numbers you find when you search are mostly marketing. These are the ones we could verify. If you want the buying decision itself rather than the data, our guide What a Website Actually Costs walks through it.
- 33 of the 42 top-listed web design agencies we could reach (78.6%) publish no prices. Six publish real figures. Three publish a range.
- Among agencies that publish, the median custom small-business build is $7,000 (range $4,000 to $18,000). Basic brochure sites: $799 median.
- Entry-tier SEO retainers: $2,200/month median in the US, £499 in the UK. Published tiers run to $10,000/month.
- A business-capable DIY site costs $125 to $360 in year one. Every headline price carries a catch: a renewal jump, a 2% to 10% transaction fee, or a domain that is free for year one only.
- Seven top-ranking cost guides claim $100 to $35,000 for the same site. One claims underlying data. None publishes a method. All seven sell what they price.
79% won't tell you a price
On 30 August 2026 we sampled 50 agencies from four "top web design agencies" lists: Clutch's US and UK directories, DesignRush, and OneLittleWeb's ranked list. We picked those four because they are the lists a buyer actually lands on when they search for an agency, which makes them the population that shapes real purchase decisions. For each agency we visited the homepage and the pricing page, where one existed. We recorded only what was on the page.
Eight sites blocked automated visits, which leaves 42 classified. Six agencies (14.3%) publish concrete prices: WebFX, Pronto Marketing, The Bureau of Small Projects, eSEOspace, Probey Services and Rudo. Three (7.1%) publish a range, the widest being KOTA's "majority of our projects sit between £30k and £150k", which narrows nothing. The other 33 (78.6%) publish nothing: a quote form, a discovery call, or a book-a-call button.
Some details from the opaque column deserve their own lines.
Funnel Boost Media maintains a page titled "Pricing" that contains no prices. It explains why it won't publish any.
DD.NYC and IT Monks ask you to declare a budget in a contact-form dropdown while publishing none of their own numbers. The disclosure flows one way.
And among the award-tier studios in our sample (Clay, Baunfire, ANML, Use All Five), published pricing was zero for zero. The more design awards on the homepage, the less likely you are to see a number.
What agencies that publish prices charge
We then went looking for the minority who do publish, and found 34 providers with real price lists: agencies, studios and productized services across the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, the UAE and a few other markets. Prices below are as published, in the currency published. We converted nothing.
| Service | Median | Sample and range |
|---|---|---|
| Basic brochure site | $799 | USD, n=3, range $799 to $2,500. Elsewhere: £1,165 (n=2), €1,139 (n=2), CA$2,000 (n=3), AED 1,500 (n=2). One-time build. |
| Custom small-business site | $7,000 | USD, n=6, range $4,000 to $18,000. Elsewhere: £3,129 (n=3), €1,839 (n=2), CA$5,000 (n=3), AED 7,499 (n=2). |
| E-commerce build | $4,000 and $6,500 | No median: the USD sample is 2, and both figures are F5 Studio's theme and custom store tiers, so we publish them raw. Other published examples: €3,479, AED 3,600, from CA$3,000. |
| SEO retainer, entry tier | $2,200/mo | USD, n=4, entry tiers $1,000 to $2,900; published tiers run to $10,000/mo. UK: £499/mo entry median (n=3), tiers £110 to £1,999. |
| WordPress care plan | $89/mo | USD, n=3, entry tiers $49.99 to $147; tiers run to $359/mo. |
Every row here is traceable to a provider page: download the provider-level data (CSV, 40 priced line items with source URLs).
The ranges behind those medians are wide. Custom builds in USD ran from $4,000 (Yeet Websites, F5 Studio) to $18,000 (ReDefine Web's fully custom band). SEO retainers ran from $1,000/month (The HOTH's entry tier) to $10,000/month (its top tier), with WebFX's tiers at $2,900 to $9,200.
One caveat we want on the record: providers who publish prices skew toward productized and marketing-led shops. The medians describe the part of the market willing to show you a number. The boutique end of the market would not be in this table even if we begged.
Subscription models exist at every level too: websites from $39/month (Pay Per Month Websites) to £59/month (it'seeze's shop tier), and unlimited-design subscriptions from $699/month (ManyPixels) to $5,995/month (Designjoy's standard rate).
DIY and freelance, priced in full
Builder ads quote a monthly price. Year one works out like this, on annual billing at the business-capable tier, using each platform's own pricing page or, where the platform blocked us, dated third-party captures we flag in the method section. The six are Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, WordPress.com, Webflow and GoDaddy.
Real e-commerce moves the band to roughly $250 to $590 (Shopify Grow bills $588/year, WordPress.com Commerce $540).
Each headline number carries at least one catch. GoDaddy's price is a first-term promotion and its plan does not include a free domain. Squarespace's cheapest tier takes 2% of everything your store sells. WordPress.com takes 4% of payments on the Business plan and 10% on cheaper plans. Webflow's entry e-commerce tier takes 2%. Shopify takes up to 2% when you don't use its own payment system. Domains are free for year one only, then $10 to $18 a year. Apps and plugins are priced separately. And none of these totals includes the hours you spend building the site yourself.
One more thing we noticed while checking: prices change by country. Squarespace's pricing page showed us $12/$17/$25 tiers when loaded from Pakistan; US sources list the same plans at $19/$29 and up. The plan structure is identical. The price is not.
Freelance marketplaces sit between DIY and agency. Fiverr's own guides put a basic small-business build at $175 to $1,000 and hourly design work at $30 to $70. Upwork lists designer rates of $15 to $75+ an hour, and its hiring guide prices a small-business website project at $2,000 to $9,000. Read that top figure against the table above: Upwork's own estimate overlaps the low end of published agency pricing.
Where the guide numbers come from
Search "how much does a website cost" and you will meet a wall of guides. We reviewed seven that rank: WebFX, GoDaddy, Mark Brinker, Leadpages, Elementor, HostGator and Forbes Advisor. Their claimed costs for a small-business website span $100 to $35,000. That is a 350x spread for the same product.
| Publisher | Claimed cost | Data cited, and what they sell |
|---|---|---|
| WebFX | $100–$5,000 | Claims "2,000+ businesses", no method shown. Sells web design services from $8,000/month. |
| Leadpages | $500–$30,000 | No data. Sells a $99/month site builder, promoted throughout the article. |
| GoDaddy | $530–$640 | No data, self-described "rough guide". Sells the builder, hosting and domains it prices. |
| HostGator | $1,000–$7,500 | No data, and the article is dated March 2019. Sells hosting and a builder. |
| Forbes Advisor | $1,500–$10,000 | No method visible. Earns affiliate commissions on the builders it reviews. |
| Elementor | $2,000–$35,000 | No data. Sells Elementor Pro, hosting and AI, recommended in the article. |
| Mark Brinker | $5,000–$20,000 | "Our research", no sample size or method. Sells web design consulting. |
Claims, dates and conflicts for all seven: download the guide comparison (CSV).
The pattern in the table: the claimed cost of a website tracks what the publisher sells. Builder companies anchor low. Agencies and consultants anchor high. One publisher out of seven claims any underlying data, and it shows no method. One of the top-ranking results has been serving 2019 numbers for seven years.
We are a web design agency, so the same conflict applies to us. The difference we can offer is the method section below and a link for every figure.
Our prices, in the same table
We publish every price we charge, so here they are next to the medians from our own dataset.
| Service | 99creatix | Published market |
|---|---|---|
| Custom website, designed and built | $4,900 fixed | Published-agency median $7,000, range $4,000 to $18,000. Ours is the floor for a build of up to 8 pages; e-commerce, integrations and migrations move it. |
| E-commerce build | from $5,900 | Published examples ran $4,000 to $6,500. |
| SEO, monthly | $1,350 flat | Published entry-tier median $2,200/month. Details on our SEO service page. |
| Local SEO / content / branding | $750 / $950 / $1,800 | Monthly, monthly, and from-price respectively. |
The full list, itemised to the line, is on our pricing page. Judge us inside the same table as everyone else. That is the point of publishing it.
Collected 30 August 2026 in a one-day window. 50 agencies sampled from Clutch US and UK, DesignRush and OneLittleWeb; 8 were unreachable and excluded from percentages. 34 providers with first-party price lists recorded as published, no currency conversions. Platform prices read from live pricing pages where reachable; Squarespace and Webflow re-verified in a browser; GoDaddy, Upwork, Fiverr and Forbes Advisor figures come from dated third-party captures.
Method
Collection date: 30 August 2026, one-day window.
Next review: August 2027. We re-run the same sample every August and publish what changed, so the figures on this page carry a date rather than drifting quietly.
Opacity sample: 50 agencies from Clutch US, Clutch UK, DesignRush and OneLittleWeb list pages. Classification from the agency's own site only; directory metadata (like DesignRush's hourly-rate tags) did not count as published pricing. 8 of 50 sites blocked automated visits and were excluded from percentages.
Price dataset: 34 providers with first-party pricing pages, found through search. Only figures visible on the provider's own page were recorded. No estimates, no currency conversions. Sample sizes appear next to every median because some cells are small, and a median of 2 is a midpoint, not a market truth.
Platform and marketplace figures: read from each platform's live pricing page where possible. Squarespace, Webflow, GoDaddy, Upwork, Fiverr and Forbes blocked automated access; for those we used dated third-party captures and re-verified Squarespace and Webflow in a browser before publishing. GoDaddy, Upwork, Fiverr and Forbes figures carry that caveat.
Known limitations: small samples per cell, an English-language bias, a one-day window, and a price-publishing population that skews productized. This is a census of who tells you the price and what they charge. It is not a survey of what every project costs.
The data: every row behind this study is public, free to reuse with attribution and a link to this page. Download the full dataset, or the individual files: the 50-agency opacity audit, the 34 published price lists, the seven cost guides, the DIY platforms and the marketplaces. Each file carries the source URL for every figure in it. Questions, corrections and disputes to contact@99creatix.com, and we will publish any correction we accept.
Cite this study. The full paper, with the method, every table and 25 references, is published as a PDF: Web Design Pricing Transparency in 2026 (99creatix Research, working paper, version 1.0, 31 August 2026, author Madiha Fatima, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22684627, archived at Zenodo). Suggested citation: Fatima, M. (2026). Web Design Pricing Transparency in 2026: A Census of 50 Top-Listed Agencies, 34 Published Price Lists, 6 DIY Platforms and 7 Cost Guides. 99creatix Research. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22684627