How much does a website cost for a small business?

Three ways to pay, and why the number looks so different in each

Ask five people what a small business website costs and you will get five numbers that are not actually answers to the same question. One of them is quoting a one-time build and leaving hosting, updates and fixes for you to discover later. One is quoting the monthly fee of a do-it-yourself builder, where the labour is yours. One is quoting a managed site, where the build, the hosting and the upkeep are one bill. Before comparing any figure, find out which of the three it is, because a low number in the first model and a higher one in the third can easily cost the same over three years.

We sell the third model, and we publish the price rather than making you book a call to hear it. That is deliberate. A price you can read before you pick up the phone is the only kind you can compare.

Our range: $150 to $400 a month, with no build fee

Our Starter plan is $150 a month and covers a one-to-five-page site: custom design, a mobile layout, Google Business setup, and hosting and updates included. Professional is $250 a month for five to fifteen pages and adds local pages for each service and town, lead-capture forms and a monthly report. Premium is $400 a month for fifteen pages and up, including an online store or booking, AI answering and priority support. There is no setup fee and no contract — the plans run month to month — and a domain is billed at cost if you do not already own one.

The honest way to place yourself in that range is to count pages, not features. A contractor with three services and one town is a Starter site. A rental or restaurant business that wants a page for each town from Corolla to Hatteras is a Professional site. Anybody taking payments or bookings online is Premium, because the checkout is where the work and the legal exposure both live.

The line items a cheap quote tends to leave out

Accessibility is the first. The Justice Department's position is that the ADA applies to websites of public-facing businesses: Title III reaches businesses open to the public, and the Department has held that view about web content since 1996. A site built without labelled forms, text alternatives on images and keyboard navigation is not finished, it is a future invoice. We build it in from the first page, because retrofitting is always the expensive way to buy it.

Honest copy is the second. North Carolina's unfair-and-deceptive-practices statute and the FTC's advertising rules both apply to what your site claims, which is why we will not paste the industry's favourite visitor-loss statistics onto your homepage. Nobody has ever shown us the study behind them, and a claim you cannot back up is a liability rather than a sales line.

Ownership is the third. A domain is registered through a registrar and should be registered in your business's name, not the designer's. A quote that is cheap because the designer keeps the domain and the hosting login is not cheap; it is a lease you did not know you had signed.

Where sales tax does and does not enter the picture

If you sell goods through the site, the state's general rate (NC general sales tax rate 4.75%) applies to those retail sales before local add-ons, and your checkout has to collect it. That is a cost of running a store, not of building a website, and it is why the Premium tier is priced where it is.

Whether a design invoice itself carries sales tax is a question we will not answer with a blanket yes or no. The statute's list of taxable digital products does not name web design, but we have not read a Department of Revenue ruling that settles it, and your accountant is the right person to confirm how your own invoices are treated.

Public-sector clients carry a dated deadline

One group of Outer Banks clients has a fixed calendar rather than a judgement call. Under the 2024 Title II rule, state and local government web content must meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and the deadline depends on the entity's population (compliance April 26, 2027 / April 26, 2028). If you build or maintain pages for a town, a county department or a special district, those dates are part of the price conversation, because the obligation follows the content even when a private firm made it.

Comparing our number with anyone else's

Put any two quotes side by side and ask the same four questions of each. Who owns the domain and the hosting account at the end? Is accessibility in the scope or an extra? What does a change cost after launch — is it included, billed by the hour, or simply not offered? And what happens when you stop paying — do you keep the site, the content, or neither?

A one-time build that answers those well can be a good deal. A monthly plan that answers them badly is not. The number on its own tells you very little; the answers tell you what you are buying.

Tell us how many services you sell, which towns you serve and whether you take payments online, and we will tell you which of the three tiers you are — usually on the first call, and in writing.