What a Small Business Website Should Actually Cost

Website pricing is confusing on purpose. Here's the shape of it, so you can tell a fair quote from a padded one.

What the pieces actually cost

• A domain — a small annual fee. Genuinely cheap.
• Hosting — a monthly cost that scales with traffic you probably don't have yet.
• An SSL certificate — free, from Let's Encrypt. Nobody should be charging you for this.
• The build — this is the whole variable. Everything else is rounding.

Why agency quotes vary so wildly

A four-figure quote is usually not buying you better code. It's buying discovery calls, revisions, project management and the agency's risk that you'll change your mind twice. For a business that knows what it sells, most of that is overhead you're paying for.

The question that actually matters

Not "what does it cost to build" but "what does it cost to change". A cheap site you cannot edit becomes expensive the first time you need a new price on the page. A site you can edit yourself has a maintenance cost of zero.

Volnyn's free plan has no time limit and paid plans start from $3.99/month, with hosting, SSL and a custom domain included. Start free at volnyn.com and find out what you actually need before you spend anything.