There is no honest single number for "a website." Anyone who gives you one over the phone is quoting a template they haven't seen your business yet. But there are honest ranges, and once you know what sits inside each one, the quotes you get stop being mysterious.
We build sites on the Grand Strand for restaurants, contractors, and shops, at a fixed price agreed before we start. Here's how the money actually breaks down.
The $1,000–$3,000 range
This is a focused brochure site: a strong homepage, a handful of real pages, your actual photos, mobile-first, and the basic local SEO that gets you showing up for your own name and town. For a lot of service businesses, this is genuinely all you need to look credible and get the phone ringing.
What you should not expect at this level: e-commerce, custom booking systems, or dozens of pages. If someone promises all of that for $1,000, something is getting faked — usually with a page-builder template that a hundred other businesses within five miles are also using.
The $3,000–$10,000 range
Now you're paying for real structure: online ordering or reservations, a proper gallery or catalog, service-area pages that rank in nearby towns, schema markup, and a site built to be edited and grown instead of rebuilt in two years. This is where most of our restaurant and contractor work lands.
The gap between a $1,000 site and an $8,000 site is almost never "prettier." It's whether the site does a job — takes the booking, pre-qualifies the lead, ranks in the next town over.
The three line items agencies hide
Wherever your quote lands, ask about these before you sign. Their absence is how a low number stays low:
- Ownership. Do you own the domain, the hosting, the code, and the content when it's done — or are you renting your own website back from the agency every month?
- Content. Who writes the words and takes the photos? "Client provides all content" is how a cheap quote stays cheap and a project stalls for six months.
- After launch. What does an edit cost next year? Is there a lock-in contract, and what happens if you leave?
What actually moves the number
Four things account for most of the spread between one quote and the next. When a number surprises you — high or low — it's almost always one of these.
- Page count with real content. Ten pages of genuinely different, useful content is ten times the writing, photography, and structure of one page. Pages that exist just to pad a sitemap cost money and rank for nothing.
- Who makes the content. If the agency writes the words, shoots the photos, and builds out the menu or catalog, that labor is in the price. If you're providing all of it, the quote shrinks — and the project now depends on your busiest month.
- The moving parts. Online ordering, reservations, quote forms that pre-qualify, galleries that grow — every feature has to be built, tested on a phone, and made obvious enough that a first-time visitor uses it without thinking.
- Search work baked in. A site built to rank — town pages, service pages, schema, a clean Google Business Profile — takes real hours beyond a site built to merely exist. That's the difference between a brochure and local SEO you can stand on.
What about the DIY builders?
Wix, Squarespace, and the rest are real options, and it would be silly to pretend otherwise. If you're testing an idea, or the business is a weekend side project, build it yourself and keep your money.
The trade is your time and the ceiling. You'll spend nights fighting a template instead of running your business, and the result tends to look like the template — because it is the template. The moment the site needs to compete — outrank the place two blocks over, take bookings, show up for searches in Conway and Pawleys Island and not just on your own street — is usually the moment owners hand it to someone who does web design all day.
The monthly costs nobody itemizes
The build price is not the whole cost, and an honest quote says so out loud. The domain is cheap — most cost less than a tank of gas per year. Hosting for a well-built small-business site is modest. The real ongoing cost is upkeep: edits, seasonal hours and menu changes, keeping everything fast and unbroken. Some owners handle that themselves. Others put it on a monthly care plan so it's never their problem at nine on a Friday night. Either way, get the number in writing before you sign — "free hosting" from an agency is very often where the lock-in lives.
Redesign, or start over?
If you already have a site, you may not need a from-scratch build at all. When the bones are decent — sensible pages, content that's still true — a redesign gets you a current, fast, mobile-first site for less than a full build. When the site is a decade old, built on a dying platform, or ranking for nothing, starting clean is usually cheaper than renovating. A good agency tells you which one you are before quoting either.
How we price it
Fixed scope, fixed price, agreed up front. You own everything — domain, hosting, code, content — the day it launches. The quote arrives within one business day, in writing — and most builds are live in two to six weeks. No hourly meter, no retainer you can't cancel, no surprise line items at signing.
For a concrete anchor: our Launch Build is $2,400, the quote comes back within one business day, and every build includes 30 days of free fixes after launch. The numbers are published, not "call for a quote."
If you want the honest number for your business, the fastest path is to tell us what you've got now and what you wish it did. That's a real conversation, not a sales call.