Ask ten agencies what a website costs and you will get ten discovery calls. That is not an accident. A quote given after a call can be adjusted to what you look able to pay, and a published price cannot. So the number stays behind a form, and you spend two weeks finding out you were never in the right price bracket to begin with.
This piece is the version we would give you on a call, written down. It covers what each rung of the market actually costs, what you get for it, what nobody quotes for, and how to work out which rung your business belongs on. Our own prices are in here at full detail, because it would be strange to write this and then hide them.
- Price tracks who does the thinking, not how many pages you get. A template costs little because you do the thinking.
- The most expensive website is the cheap one you replace in eighteen months, and the rebuild is the smaller half of that cost.
- Ask for a quote itemised by line. An agency that will not break its number down is telling you something.
- Timeline is a price. A build that drifts from 30 days to six months costs you five months of enquiries you will never see.
The four price rungs
Almost every small business website is bought at one of four levels. The gaps between them are large and they are mostly about who is responsible for thinking, not about how many pages you receive.
Those ranges are our read of the small business market across the five markets we work in, based on the quotes clients show us when they arrive. They are not a survey. Treat them as a map, not a measurement.
What actually drives the price
Page count is the number everyone asks about and it is close to the least important. Four things move a website quote more than anything else.
Whether the thinking is included
A site built from a brief you wrote is cheaper than a site built from a business problem you described. The second one includes someone working out what the pages should be, what each one needs to say, and what a visitor should do next. That work is invisible in the finished site and it is most of what separates a site that looks fine from a site that produces enquiries.
Whether copy is included
A surprising number of quotes assume you will supply the words. Then the project stalls for six weeks waiting for you to write them, and you end up paying twice: once in fees and once in delay. Ask directly whether copywriting is in the number.
Whether search is built in or bolted on
Technical SEO done during a build costs a fraction of what it costs afterwards. Site structure, page speed, schema and a sitemap are cheap decisions on day one and expensive retrofits on day two hundred. If a quote does not mention them, the site will need them anyway and you will pay for them later.
Whether anyone will know if it worked
Analytics and lead tracking are usually a rounding error in the build cost and the only reason you will ever know whether the site earned its money. A build without them is a site you cannot manage.
If a quote has one number on it and no breakdown, you are not comparing prices. You are comparing confidence.
Our full breakdown is on the pricing page, every line, every plan.What ours costs, itemised
Our build is $4,900, one time, for a custom site of up to eight pages. Here is where every dollar of it goes.
Growth work is separate and optional. Our Grow retainer is $2,400 a month on rolling 30-day terms and covers SEO and content, paid search management, conversion work and AI search visibility. You can buy the build without it.
The costs nobody quotes for
These are not agency fees. They are third-party costs you will pay whoever builds your site, and an honest quote names them before you sign rather than after.
- Hosting: roughly $10 to $50 a month for a small business site.
- Domain: roughly $15 a year, more for a premium name.
- Premium plugins or apps: anything from nothing to a few hundred a year, depending on what the site has to do.
- Photography: free if you have it, several hundred to a few thousand if you need a shoot.
- Advertising spend: if you run ads, this goes to Google or Meta, not to the agency. Ours is billed at cost and never marked up.
The one to watch is the fifth. Some agencies bill ad spend through their own account with a margin on top, and you never see the real number. Ask whose account the ads run in.
Which rung you belong on
The honest answer is that plenty of businesses do not need an agency. Three questions usually settle it.
What does the site have to do?
If it exists so people can check you are real before they call the number they already have, a template is a perfectly good answer and you should not spend $4,900 on it. If it has to be found by people who have never heard of you and turn them into enquiries, that is a different job and it is the job agencies are for.
What is one customer worth?
A business where a customer is worth $80 and a business where a customer is worth $8,000 should not spend the same on a website. If two extra enquiries a month would pay for the build inside a year, the maths is straightforward. If it would take six years, do not do it.
What is your time worth?
A DIY build is not free. It is forty to eighty hours of your attention, taken from running the business. Price those hours honestly and the gap between the rungs narrows considerably.
The 99creatix figures are our published prices, not estimates. The market ranges come from quotes prospective clients have shown us during fit calls across the UK, EU, USA, Canada and UAE, so they reflect what small businesses are actually quoted rather than published rate cards. Third-party costs are current retail prices for typical small business hosting, domains and plugins. Where we are estimating, we have said so in the text rather than in a footnote.
Why agencies hide prices, and what it costs them
Hidden pricing serves the agency. It lets a quote flex to the client, and it keeps every enquiry alive long enough for a sales process to work on it. That is a real commercial advantage and it is why the practice is close to universal.
The cost is that a large share of the people filling in the form were never going to be able to afford the work, and a large share of the people who could afford it never filled in the form, because they assumed they could not. Publishing the number loses the first group deliberately and wins some of the second.
We publish ours because we would rather have a shorter list of better-fitting conversations. If $4,900 is more than the site is worth to your business, that is a useful thing for both of us to know in ten seconds rather than in three weeks.