What a small business website actually costs

The quote you are given is for the build. The bill arrives over the next year. That gap is why so many first websites are abandoned half-finished: the money was budgeted for the thing that gets designed, and ran out on the things that keep it true. It helps to see all the lines at once, even the ones you will pay in hours rather than currency.

The five lines on a real bill

• The domain name: small, annual, and forever. A standard .com is usually somewhere near ten to fifteen dollars a year, more for a sought-after name.
• Hosting: anywhere from free on a hobby tier to a monthly fee once you need reliability, email and backups.
• The build: a subscription builder, a freelancer or an agency, and the gap between the three is roughly two orders of magnitude. Quotes vary enormously by city, so get local ones rather than trusting a blog's numbers — including this one's.
• Content: photographs, and about fifteen sentences that are actually true. This is the line everyone under-budgets and the line that decides the result.
• Changes: the small edits over the first year — a new price, a new service, a corrected phone number.

The line that is always underestimated

Nothing makes a cheap site look expensive faster than real photographs. And nothing makes an expensive site look cheap faster than stock images of a team that is not yours. Whatever else you spend on, spend on eight good photographs of your actual work, taken in daylight. This is also the one line an AI tool cannot do for you: it can write around your photographs, but it cannot have taken them.

Where a subscription becomes the biggest number

Monthly pricing hides its own total. A plan at twenty dollars a month is two hundred and forty dollars a year and seven hundred and twenty over three, which is agency territory for a five-page site you maintain yourself. That is not an argument against subscriptions — ongoing work deserves ongoing payment — but it is an argument for knowing the three-year number before you sign up for the first month.

What we charge, plainly

One website build is $2.99, once, and no subscription starts on its own — that pays for the design interview and the build itself. Ongoing plans add monthly credits, a getcasel.com address and the broader tools, and the pricing page lists them line by line rather than by tier name.

What it does not include is the part above: your photographs, your prices, and the decision about what you are actually selling. We would rather say that here than have you find out after paying.

Ask what the three-year number is, and what happens to the site if you stop paying. Any honest answer to those two makes the rest of the pricing page readable.

The cheapest version that still works

• One page, done densely, rather than five thin ones — the test for a second page is here.
• Your own photographs, and no stock people.
• The contact route visible without scrolling, in whatever form your customers actually use.
• Prices, or at least a range. A page with no numbers reads as expensive.
• One language, written natively, rather than two half-done — prompt language and site language are separate choices.

That is a site that earns its keep for the price of a domain and an afternoon. The step-by-step version is here.