A single landing page starts at $850. A full small business website starts at $2,900. An online store starts at $4,800. A custom application or dashboard starts at $9,500. Those are my published starting points for a well defined project, and they are on the pricing page where anyone can check them.
The reason that answer is hard to find anywhere else is not that the number is complicated. It is that most of this industry will not say it out loud, because a vague answer gets you on a phone call and a real answer lets you keep shopping. I would rather you know before you call.
Why nobody will give you a straight number
If you have rung around four web designers, you already know the pattern. Nobody publishes prices. Everybody wants a discovery call. The quotes that finally arrive are thousands of dollars apart and none of them explain why.
Some of that is legitimate. A website genuinely is not one product, and a five page site for a plumber and a fifty page site with booking, accounts, and payments are not the same job even though both get called a website. Quoting blind would be guessing.
But a lot of it is not legitimate. A starting price is not the same as a final price, and refusing to give one is a sales tactic, not a scoping problem. Every other trade manages it. A plumber will tell you a callout fee.
So here is the honest version: I can tell you where things start, I can tell you exactly what moves the number, and I cannot tell you what your project costs until I know what it is.
What actually moves the price
In rough order of how much it matters.
How many pages, and how much of each one is genuinely different. A landing page is one page doing one job, which is why it starts at $850. A small business site is usually five to eight pages with a real structure behind it, which is why it starts at $2,900. Page count matters less than how many of those pages are actually distinct. Ten pages that share a layout is a much smaller job than four that do not.
Whether it takes money. The moment a site sells something it grows a catalog, a checkout, a payment processor, tax and shipping rules, customer accounts, and order states. That is why ecommerce starts at $4,800 rather than $2,900. It is a different category of work, not a bigger version of the same one.
Who writes the words and gathers the photos. This is the single most common reason a project stalls or costs more than expected, and almost nobody warns you about it up front. If you have your copy and your images ready, the build moves. If a large content library has to be written, that is quoted separately. Professional photography and video production are not included at any price on my list.
What it has to talk to. A booking system, a CRM, an inventory system, an accounting package. Each one adds integration work, and integration work is where estimates go wrong, because you find out what the other system will not do halfway through. Anything in that territory gets scoped before it is priced.
Whether it is a template or a design. A theme with your logo dropped into it is cheap because it is fast, and it looks like what it is. Designing for the specific business costs more up front and is the reason you are not stuck asking someone else to change a phone number later.
Whether anyone maintains it afterward. Care plans start at $65 a month. That is optional and month to month, but a site nobody maintains does not fail loudly. It fails quietly, usually in the checkout or the contact form, and you find out from a customer who gave up.
What the price never includes
This is the part that turns a quoted price into a bigger annual number than you were expecting, so it is worth being blunt about.
Domains, platform subscriptions, plugin licenses, and payment processing stay in your own accounts and get billed to you directly. I do not mark them up, and you should ask anyone quoting you whether they do, because a markup on a recurring cost is a quiet annuity.
Paid advertising spend and ad management are separate. Professional photography and video production are separate. Trademark search and registration are separate, and I will recommend you do it while telling you plainly that I am not a lawyer.
And nobody can honestly sell you guaranteed rankings or guaranteed traffic. If that is in a quote, the quote is the problem.
How to compare two quotes that are thousands apart
When two quotes for the same website land on the same desk thousands of dollars apart, they are almost never describing the same job. Four questions usually explain the gap.
Who owns it when it is finished? The answer should be you: the design, the content, the domain, and the code. If you cannot leave without losing your website, you are renting it. Ask explicitly what happens if you want to move.
Is it a template or a build? Neither is wrong. A template genuinely is cheaper and for some businesses it is the right call. But you should know which one you are buying, because the price difference is mostly this.
What happens after launch? Some quotes end at launch. Some include a year of updates. Some include nothing and charge hourly from day one. My hourly rate is $85 and I quote the work before I start it, so nothing arrives as a surprise line.
Who is actually doing the work? With an agency, the person selling is not usually the person building, and something is lost between them. With me, there is nobody in between, which is a real advantage on communication and a real constraint on capacity. Both are true and you should weigh both.
What I would tell a friend
If you need one page to get phone calls, get one page. Do not let anyone talk you into eight.
If you sell things, budget properly the first time, because a cheap store that cannot take the payment you need is more expensive than the right one.
If someone will not tell you what it starts at, keep calling. Not because they are dishonest, but because the conversation is going to be like that for the whole project.
And whatever you spend, get the ownership question answered in writing before money changes hands. The single most expensive situation I see is not an overpriced website. It is a business that cannot get into its own site because the person who built it stopped answering.
Where to go from here
Every number in this post is on the pricing page, along with what each tier includes and what it does not. If you want to see what these figures actually produce, the Tex's Prints case study is a full two-division ecommerce build, and the website development page covers how a standard small business build runs.
If something here does not match what you have been quoted, ask me. I will give you a straight answer, even if the answer is that I am not the right fit.