Most small business owners find out what their website cost them somewhere between invoice three and a panicked Google search at 11pm. The upfront number looks reasonable. The ongoing one is the surprise.

Here is a clear breakdown of what each route actually costs — not the headline price, but the real one once you add hosting, maintenance, updates, and the time you spend managing it.

The agency route

A local agency charges anywhere from $2,000 to $15,000 to build a site, depending on how many pages and how much custom work you want. That buys you a finished site and, usually, a few rounds of revisions.

What it does not buy you is ongoing maintenance. Hosting runs another $10 to $50 a month. If you want text changed, a page added, or anything beyond clicking a button yourself, you are back to paying by the hour — typically $75 to $150 an hour. Sites built this way tend to get left alone because touching them costs money, which means they drift out of date.

Over three years, an agency site often costs $5,000 to $20,000 once you account for hosting, changes, and the occasional rebuild when it starts looking old.

The freelancer route

Freelancers are cheaper upfront — often $500 to $3,000 for a basic site. The risk is continuity. If your freelancer moves on, changes direction, or simply gets busy, you are left holding a site you cannot edit yourself and nobody available to help.

The maintenance problem is the same as with agencies. The per-hour cost is usually lower, but the site still needs someone to run it.

The DIY builder route

DIY website builders charge $15 to $40 a month for a plan that lets you build and host your own site. That sounds affordable, and it is — if you have the time and inclination to learn their editor, write your own copy, and arrange your own layout.

Most small business owners do not. The monthly fee ends up costing real money and several evenings that were supposed to be free. Abandoned DIY sites are the most common type of small business website: technically live, but not doing anything useful.

The monthly lease route

A newer model charges a flat monthly fee that covers the build, hosting, and unlimited rebuilds. The economics are different: you pay less upfront and the ongoing cost is predictable.

The trade-off is that you do not own the build. If you stop paying, the site goes offline, similar to how a leased car goes back when you stop making payments. Your content, your domain, and your words remain yours throughout.

At $39 to $149 a month depending on what gets built, a leased site costs roughly the same per year as a DIY builder, with none of the self-assembly and with a professional result from day one.

What to actually compare

When you are comparing options, the honest calculation is: total cost over two years, including your own time at whatever rate you value it. A $500 freelance site plus six hours of your time dealing with it each year is not a $500 site.

The right answer depends on how central your website is to how customers find you, how often the content needs to change, and how much you want to be involved in maintaining it. For most local service businesses, the maintenance burden of ownership is the part nobody mentions until they are paying for it.

Where websiites fits

websiites operates on the monthly lease model described above. You describe your business, the AI builds the site, and you see it before paying anything. Plans start at $39/month with no setup fee and no contract.

We build sites for restaurants and food businesses, contractors and trades, salons and beauty businesses, medical practices, and professional service firms.