The four price tiers, honestly
Every web project falls into one of these four buckets. Where yours lands depends on how much of the work is custom and how many features it needs.
1. Template + DIY: $0–$500
Wix, Squarespace, or Webflow with a template. You build it. Fine for a personal page or a coming-soon holding site. A DIY template is only as good as the time you put into the content, structure and setup behind it.
2. Template + designer help: $500–$2,500
Someone customizes a template for you, swaps images, sets colors, wires the contact form. Faster than DIY; how far the template is adapted to your brand and content is what you're paying for. Good option if budget is tight and you need something live in two weeks.
3. Professional small-business site: about $2,300–$8,000
In our calculator, a template-based site of up to five pages comes out at about $2,300–$2,900, and a 6–10 page site with a custom design at about $4,100–$5,200. A fully bespoke design, more unique page layouts, and add-ons such as copywriting, photography or booking forms push a project toward the top of this range. Either way you get a brand-aligned layout and a mobile-first build with clean, search-friendly structure. Typical scope: 5–10 pages, analytics setup and launch coordination. Takes 3–6 weeks. (A fuller SEO setup with schema, sitemap and Google Business Profile is an add-on in our calculator.)
4. Ecommerce or custom-built app: $5,900–$25,000+
Anything with a cart, subscriptions, user accounts, custom integrations, or an actual application behind the marketing pages. In our calculator, online stores start around $5,900 and custom apps around $10,800; bigger catalogs, integrations and account features push either one well past that. More design work, more code, more testing, longer timelines (6–10 weeks for a store, 8–14 for an app). Ongoing maintenance costs more too.
What actually drives the price up
Three factors move a site from the low end of a range to the high end:
- Number of unique page templates. A "10-page site" where 7 pages share one template is much cheaper than a "10-page site" where every page is a bespoke layout.
- Custom functionality. A booking calendar, a multi-step form, a custom search, a members-only area — every one of these adds real dev time on top of the design work.
- Content creation. If you already have the copy and photography, the project moves faster. If we write or shoot for you, copywriting ($1,200) and photography ($1,500) are add-ons in our calculator.
Want your own number? The calculator further down this page uses the same math we use to price real projects — it just runs on your inputs instead of ours.
What you can safely skip
A few things agencies love to sell that most small businesses don't actually need:
- An 80-page site. Almost every business converts on 5–8 well-crafted pages. Padding out to 20+ pages dilutes SEO focus and slows the site down.
- Custom animations everywhere. One or two well-placed motion moments read as premium. Ten of them read as busy.
- Enterprise CMS platforms for a small business. If you'll only edit content once a quarter, a lightweight platform like Astro + Netlify or Wix Studio is faster, cheaper, and easier to maintain than WordPress or Drupal.
The ongoing cost people forget
A website's not a one-time purchase. Every site needs hosting, a domain, SSL, backups, and occasional updates. Budget $25–$150/month depending on what's included. Our hosting plans start at $25/month and include SSL and automated backups; regular updates come with the higher hosting tiers or a separate maintenance plan from $50/month. The domain itself is registered separately.
Skip this at your peril. We regularly see businesses come to us with a beautiful site built five years ago that hasn't been touched since — broken forms, expired SSL, plugins with security holes, and no backups. Rebuilding costs the same as buying a new site.
How we quote at Media City Design
Every project we take on gets a written proposal with one number. Not a range, not an estimate, not "starting at" — one number. That number includes:
- All design, development, and revisions in the agreed scope
- A written milestone schedule
- Launch coordination and DNS handoff
Hosting is a separate monthly plan (from $25/month), and ongoing maintenance is optional, so neither is buried in the build price. If the scope changes mid-project, we write a new fixed price for the change before doing the work. You never get a bill you didn't approve.
Want to see what a finished project looks like? Read the Burbank Chamber of Commerce case study. And if you're nearby, here's how website projects for Burbank businesses work with us, including meeting in person.