> answers/cost
How much does a website cost?
UPDATED OCTOBER 30, 2026
A custom website for a small business costs $3,900 at Ghost, as a fixed price agreed before the build, and is typically live in 14 days. An e-commerce site is $7,900. Those numbers include design from a blank page, up to eight pages of copy written with you, a CMS, hosting, analytics, lead forms and the technical SEO foundation. The price of a website elsewhere ranges from almost nothing for a template you assemble yourself to many times that figure at a large agency; the difference is who does the thinking, whether the site is built to be found, and whether you own it afterwards.
What the price actually pays for
- Design: a site drawn for your business, not a theme with your logo dropped in.
- Copy: the words on the page, written to answer what your customers search for.
- Code: a modern stack that loads fast on phones and passes Core Web Vitals.
- Search readiness: schema, sitemap, metadata and structure, done at build time.
- Hand-over: a CMS you can edit, and the keys to the domain and hosting.
What makes a website cost more
More pages, more custom functionality (bookings, member areas, calculators), e-commerce, multiple languages, integrations with your CRM or booking system, and photography or video production. Each of these is a real cost and should appear as a line in a quote, not as a surprise later.
What you should not pay for
- Hourly rates with no cap. You are paying for the agency's uncertainty.
- Monthly fees to keep a site you have already paid for online, beyond hosting at cost.
- A site you do not own, on a platform you cannot leave.
- Plugin and theme licences that have to be renewed every year to keep the site working.
How Ghost prices it
Fixed packages: Website $3,900, E-shop $7,900, Web app from $9,900, AI automation from $1,900, Care plan $190 a month. The figure is agreed in writing before we start and does not move. If your budget is below a package, say so in the brief; we will tell you what fits.
> faq
Related questions
- How much does a website cost per month?
- After the build, the only recurring cost you need is hosting and a domain, which together are a few dollars a month at cost. Ghost's optional care plan is $190 a month and includes hosting, monitoring, backups and monthly changes.
- How much should I pay for a website?
- Enough that someone thinks about your business, writes the words, and builds it to be found; not so much that you are funding an agency's overhead. For a small business that is a fixed figure in the low thousands, with the price known before the work starts.
- Is a $500 website worth it?
- If you assemble it yourself from a template and your customers already know you, it can be. If you need to be found by strangers, the words, structure and speed are what bring them, and those are what a $500 site leaves out.
> open_channel.exe
Tell us what you need. Any budget.
Say what you have in mind and what you can spend. You get back what we would build for it, how long it takes and a fixed price, usually within one business day.
[ GET A FIXED QUOTE ]