How much does it cost to maintain a website per month?

On a builder, the subscription is the maintenance: roughly $17 to $36 a month for the plans a local business would use, plus about $15 a year for the domain. For a custom site, budget $100 to $300 a month for hosting, updates, security patches and small changes. Our care plan is $150 a month and includes the changes, so nothing sits broken waiting for a quote.

Do I still need a website if I have a Google Business Profile and Instagram?

Yes, and for a reason that has nothing to do with looking professional. The profile and the account are rented. A suspension or an algorithm change takes them away with no appeal you control. The website is the one address you own, and it is what Google, ChatGPT and a customer checking hours all read first.

Is Wix cheaper than a custom website over five years?

On subscription alone, yes — five years of a $36 plan is about $2,160. A custom build plus care runs more. The comparison that matters is what each produces: our crawl of 1,348 funded companies found Wix sites were never invisible to AI crawlers, so the platform is not the problem. The ceiling is what it cannot do: lead routing, booking, quoting, a CRM that texts back. If your site is a brochure, stay on the builder. If it is the lead engine, own it.

How long does a small-business website take to build?

A builder site takes a weekend. A freelancer typically delivers in two to four weeks. Our custom builds run four to eight weeks from kickoff, because the first two are spent on how you actually sell — the quote form, the booking flow, the follow-up — before anything is designed.

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Pricing

What a Small-Business Website Costs in 2026 (Metro Detroit Prices, Itemized)

Owners ask us this more than any other question, and every answer they find online is written by a company selling one of the options. Here is the whole range — builder, freelancer, agency, custom — with the numbers we actually quoted this year and the five-year math nobody shows you.

By Joe BarakatSeptember 23, 20269 min read

Desk with a laptop, printed quotes and a calculator, comparing website costs. — Four quotes for the same business can differ by a factor of fifty. The difference is rarely the design.

Why every answer you found was wrong for you

Search "how much does a website cost for a small business" and the top results are written by Wix, by a freelancer marketplace, and by agencies with a starting price to defend. Each one is honest about its own number and silent about the others. The owner ends up with four quotes that differ by a factor of fifty and no way to tell which one is the right kind of expensive.

This post is the whole range, with the numbers we quoted in 2026 included, and a way to decide that does not depend on which vendor you happened to call first.

The four price bands

Builder (Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy): $200 to $600 a year. You pay a subscription, pick a template, and do the work yourself. The plans a local business actually needs run about $17 to $36 a month, plus the domain. No build cost. The trade is that you own nothing but the domain, the site cannot do anything the template does not allow, and the day you outgrow it you start over.

Freelancer: $1,500 to $5,000. A designer or developer builds on WordPress or a builder, usually in two to four weeks. Quality ranges from excellent to abandoned. The questions that decide which you get are unglamorous: who owns the hosting account, who has the passwords, and what happens when they take a full-time job.

Local agency: $5,000 to $15,000, sometimes more. A team, a process, a project manager. Most Metro Detroit agencies build on WordPress or a template system and charge a monthly retainer afterwards. This is the band where owners most often discover, a year later, that the site lives in the agency’s account and leaving means rebuilding.

Custom build, owned: $1,500 to $7,500 one-time, plus $150 a month. That is our range from this year. The low end was a fork of an app we had already built for a similar business; the high end was a full site plus a customer-facing app with online payments. The monthly covers hosting coordination, updates and changes. The code, the domain, the analytics property and the ad accounts are registered to the owner on day one, which is the whole point.

The costs that are not on the quote

The domain is about $15 a year and should be in your name, in a registrar account you control. If a vendor offers to "handle it," ask for the login anyway.

Hosting is $0 on a builder, $10 to $30 a month on shared WordPress hosting, and often $0 on a modern static host for a custom site. Plugins and add-ons on WordPress are where a $3,000 site quietly becomes a $3,000 site plus $80 a month.

The redesign is the big one. A builder or template site typically gets rebuilt every three to five years because it cannot be extended. "Website redesign cost" is one of the most searched phrases in this category for exactly that reason. A site you own gets extended instead, which is why our monthly includes changes rather than billing them.

And the cost nobody itemizes: the lead you did not get. A site that loads slowly on a phone, has no form that routes anywhere, and shows no recent reviews is free to run and expensive to have. That number is bigger than every line above it, and it is the reason a $36-a-month site can be the most expensive option on this list.

The five-year math, done honestly

Five years on a $36 Wix plan is about $2,160. Five years of a $4,000 custom build plus $150 a month is $13,000. On subscription alone the builder wins, and any post that tells you otherwise is hiding the monthly.

The honest comparison is what each produces. When we crawled 1,348 recently funded company websites this summer, Wix sites were never invisible to an AI crawler — zero out of fifty — while sites on the most modern frameworks were invisible almost nine percent of the time. The platform is not the problem. A builder site that is fast, has accurate hours and a form that works is a perfectly good brochure.

The ceiling is what it cannot do. It cannot route a quote request to your phone in sixty seconds, hold a booking calendar that talks to your CRM, quote a job from a photo, or text a customer who stopped halfway through a form. If your website is a brochure, stay on the builder and spend the difference on ads. If your website is where the leads come from, own it, because every one of those capabilities is a lead you either capture or lose.

What to insist on at any price

Whatever band you choose, four things should be in your name before you pay the final invoice: the domain registrar account, the hosting or platform account, the analytics property, and the source code or export. A vendor who hesitates on any of them is telling you what the relationship will cost later.

Ask for the itemized quote in writing, with the monthly separated from the build. Ask what happens to the site if you stop paying the monthly. Ask who can log in. The answers matter more than the design, and they are the questions the owners who post "locked into a contract with nothing to show" wish they had asked.

If you want a second opinion on a quote you already have, send it over. We will tell you whether it is fair for the band it is in, even when the answer is that you do not need us.

Questions owners ask

How much does it cost to maintain a website per month?: On a builder, the subscription is the maintenance: roughly $17 to $36 a month for the plans a local business would use, plus about $15 a year for the domain. For a custom site, budget $100 to $300 a month for hosting, updates, security patches and small changes. Our care plan is $150 a month and includes the changes, so nothing sits broken waiting for a quote.
Do I still need a website if I have a Google Business Profile and Instagram?: Yes, and for a reason that has nothing to do with looking professional. The profile and the account are rented. A suspension or an algorithm change takes them away with no appeal you control. The website is the one address you own, and it is what Google, ChatGPT and a customer checking hours all read first.
Is Wix cheaper than a custom website over five years?: On subscription alone, yes — five years of a $36 plan is about $2,160. A custom build plus care runs more. The comparison that matters is what each produces: our crawl of 1,348 funded companies found Wix sites were never invisible to AI crawlers, so the platform is not the problem. The ceiling is what it cannot do: lead routing, booking, quoting, a CRM that texts back. If your site is a brochure, stay on the builder. If it is the lead engine, own it.
How long does a small-business website take to build?: A builder site takes a weekend. A freelancer typically delivers in two to four weeks. Our custom builds run four to eight weeks from kickoff, because the first two are spent on how you actually sell — the quote form, the booking flow, the follow-up — before anything is designed.

Where these numbers come from

Wix plans a local business would use run roughly $17 to $36 a month; Squarespace roughly $16 to $52. — Wix and Squarespace published pricing, checked September 2026 — confirm at publish, prices move
Wix produced zero AI-invisible homepages out of 50; Next.js sites 8.5%. — Revio crawl of 1,348 recently funded websites, September 2026
Revio 2026 build range of $1,500 to $7,500 plus $150 a month. — Revio quotes issued January–September 2026; the $150/month care plan is on the pricing page